That Dilemma

"I stopped eating almost a week ago. My body just can’t take this anymore…this place guarantees you lost 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."

Kimberly Polman, 49, Canadian Camp Al Hol internee, 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."

"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."

"I hate ISIS and everything that did, they stole my sister. But I believe that everybody can be redeemed if you give them a chance, and that they should face justice when they get back…but that doesn’t mean that they should be left to die out there."

Polman's sister, name withheld

 

"For over two years, dozens of Canadian ISIS suspects and their family members have been unlawfully detained in locked desert camps and prisons in northeast Syria."

"Most are young children who never chose to live under ISIS. It’s deeply troubling that these detainees and their families in Canada would have to resort to taking their government to court to end this paralysis…"

"Prime Minister Trudeau has the power to bring these Canadians home. He just needs to find the moral courage to do so."

Farida Deif, Canada Director, Human Rights Watch

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

Eleven families with Canadian citizenship who have relatives being held at the Al Hol camp for relatives of members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to order the Canadian government to retrieve their relatives from the squalid camp housing women and children in a repatriation move setting aside their involvement with the Islamist terrorist fundamentalists whose litany of vicious deadly atrocities shocked the world, but evidently not the women who travelled from Canada to Syria to join ISIS and become 'brides' of ISIS.

The families, in the interests of maintaining anonymity, will not have their names and identities published. Using a covering name of "Bring Our Loved Ones Home", they are pursuing a law suit against Canada's government for refusing to act on their appeal. Either to repatriate the Syrian-Canadian men who travelled to Syria for the express purpose of joining ISIS and are incarcerated in the Al Roj prison maintained by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish fighting group that would prefer to have the fighters and the women detainees taken off their hands altogether.

 

The Kurdish fighting groups were the only effective offensive against the Islamic State terrorists. They offered protection to Shiite Muslims whom the Sunni ISIS threatened, to the Christian and Yazidi minorities whom they killed and enslaved, giving them haven in Kurdistan while simultaneously battling the encroaching ISIS 'caliphate'. When their collaboration with U.S. forces eventually led to the overthrow of the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa the Syrian Democratic Forces ended up rounding up and incarcerating ISIS fighters and their wives and children, holding them in separate camps.

 

US-led air strikes helped Kurdish and Arab fighters capture the IS stronghold of Raqqa  Reuters

The group's application describes camp conditions as "horrific", with "a lack of clean water malnutrition, non-existent hygiene measures, an acute shortage of medical care and facilities, violence and abuse". The detainees, they point out, have never been charged with any offences, and no trial dates have been noted. The government of Syria had repatriated their own citizens from the camps and trials are ongoing, the fate of the fighters who had captured a third of Syria for their caliphate will no doubt suffer a fate similar to that they imposed on those they took prisoner and committed atrocities upon from beheading to crucifixion and other imaginative methods of death-dealing.

The Canadian families, most of whom arrived in Canada as refugees escaping persecution in their Muslim home countries, state in their filing: "The Canadian government has the ability to bring the unlawful detention to the end and secure the release of the detained Canadians". Characterizing the incarceration of Islamic State avowed Islamists as 'unlawful' is a bit of a puzzler to begin with. Universality of solutions to rogue mass slaughterers is generally to sequester them to ensure the safety of others rather than permitting them to remain at large to continue their violent depredations.

It's also a little difficult to evoke compassion for the plight of such human rights abusers whose actions shocked the world when propaganda videos were released of ISIS members exulting in the beheading of helpless prisoners whose crimes were that they were not fundamentalist Islamist butchers, but vulnerable outsiders for whom ISIS crimes represented an assault on civilized universal mores of human behaviour. That they now suffer the indignities of mass incarceration under less than hygienic conditions is sad, but no tragedy.

The tragedy is that of the children in the camp. Theirs was a tragedy when they were born to ISIS parents to begin with, and later to be raised and taught the values of fundamentalist Islamist principles of conquest and jihad. They were born abroad, not in Canada. The older children up to age 14 who were taken by their parents to Syria to be part of the brave new world of the Islamist caliphate were raised in the miasmic atmosphere of a brutalized social order, many of them exposed to and urged to take part in atrocities.

Islamic State adherents don't flinch at human butchery. They caused innumerable deaths, focusing on minority groups within their widening grasp as their geographic holdings increased and they created a mass of desperate refugees, anxious to escape death. Their victims include men, women and children. Just as the detainees by the Syrian Democratic Forces represent men, women and children -- who preyed on other human beings. These are people who share a deviant and fundamental lack of social conscience.

Calling now upon the conscience of decent people to come to their rescue.

Children hold water containers in al-Hol camp, Syria, on January 8, 2020. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)