Imprisoning the Enablers of Islamist Death and Destruction

"I stopped eating almost a week ago. My body just can’t take this anymore…this place guarantees you lose your sanity, your dignity, your humanity one way or another…"

"It’s exhausting trying to protect myself all day, all night. I can’t do it anymore."

"I am continually bleeding My teeth are all broken ... my legs cannot walk or stand. I am dying a slow death here and I have done everything I can think of to get help."

"Nothing has worked."

Canadian Kimberly Polman, 42, convert to Islam, ISIS wife, Al-Hol prison camp, Syria

 

"She was hoping she could go home, she was given reason to believe that that might be the case from someone high up in the camp, especially because of the snap election [in Canada]."

"She’s really devastated [that she can’t come home], she’s been sick for a while, she has broken teeth, she has kidney infections…she’s distraught and says she doesn’t want to live anymore….it’s the last thing she has control over."

"I am all for justice, and the choice she made has consequences beyond anything that she could have ever imagined. But we don’t have our Canadian citizenship on merit…even the most hardened criminals and murderers are granted the rights of a Canadian citizen….they are still human beings, they are still Canadians."

Kimberley Polman's sister, Canada

Women and children related to fighters of the Islamic State group wait to board buses and trucks, leaving the overcrowded al-Hol camp to return to their homes on June 3, 2019, in Hasakeh province, Syria. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Baderkhan Ahmad

The families of Canadians who left the country to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant during the time of its growing 'Caliphate', happy to be part of the revolutionary new sharia-led Islamist scourge that marched into Syria and Iraq, invading towns and cities, confronting the military in each country uniformly fearful of the terrorists' well-earned reputation for committing atrocities purposefully, to inspire horror and gaining that reputation for sadistic brutality that worked in their favour to inspire fear and ensure that opposition would melt away, have launched a lawsuit against the government of Canada.

For its inaction in committing to bring back their citizens now festering in a prison camp specifically meant to hold the wives and families of Islamic State fighter-terrorists. Separate from the Islamist women who dedicated themselves to serving the interests of the men, there is another, secure prison that holds the men in confinement. Among them are tens of thousands of ISIL diehards who arrived in Syria to become part of ISIL's purge of minorities and persecution of civilian populations from abroad; North Africa, other areas of the Middle East, countries in Europe and North America.

Not all ISIL terrorists were captured by the Kurdish armed forces, the only real opposition to the menace of the Islamic State. Many managed to evade capture and to leave the area where they were vulnerable to arrest and detention, to return to their countries of residence, covertly or under the watchful eye of policing authorities there. Some countries imprisoned their returnees, others allowed them to remain at large, under investigative watch. And while the Kurdish forces that police the camps appealed to foreign nations to repatriate their citizens, some have, most have not.

For the women and children, humanitarian groups argue that they cannot be held accountable for the crimes committed by their husbands, that they are innocent, and most certainly the children born to them as 'caliphate' offspring are innocent of any wrongdoing, and should be returned to their real home, not left to fester in the crime-infested, dangerous, inhumane and putrid confines of the Al-Hol detention camp. Where the frustrated guards hardly know where to turn next, amidst the confusion, the violence, the attacks against them, and the murders that take place within the camp.

Of the foreign women who recruited themselves to become ISIL 'wives' at part of an exciting new venture as partners in the future with Islamist terrorists who commonly executed their prisoners in the most lurid, despicable displays of inhumanity, protestations of innocence ring hollow. They knew and they approved of everything that the men they supported were inflicting on helpless unfortunates who were captured by the terrorists. In some instances pre-adolescents were taught to emulate their elders in handling weapons, in beating prisoners, in pulling triggers to cause death.

The Kurdish Autonomous Administration is doing all it can to protect the wider global public from future depredations of these criminals. Who continue to flourish elsewhere, in parts of Africa, in Afghanistan, and who  still inspire acts of terrorism by their adherents in the West. The Kurdish forces that took on that responsibility of protecting the wider world from the vicious brutality of the Islamist horde have had no assistance from any other source in managing the camps where human rights groups speak of squalid hygienic conditions and lack of security. 

It is typical of people to feel themselves to be unfairly judged and treated for merely following their goals in life, abandoning what they have in secure citizenship and a way of life that is far removed from that of hate-festering ideologies of death and destruction. They make the choice to leave the familiar and launch themselves into a brave new world of fascinating adventure. An adventure that is deadly to others, a fact they appear willingly oblivious to, yet feel entitled after the fact, to expect their transgressions to be overlooked.

In this May 1, 2021 file photo, women walk in the al-Hol camp that houses some 60,000 refugees, including families and supporters of the Islamic State group, many of them foreign nationals, in Hasakeh province, Syria.   (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad)