I’d like you to do me a favour. The next time you read a story like that of Shamima Begum, the UK Islamic State (IS) supporter who desperately wants to come home, although she does not regret her decision to join the terrorist group and thinks the Manchester bombing was justified, or see a report with IS ladies wailing about how they are suffering and cannot believe that their country is abandoning them, or read analysis on how we have a ‘moral obligation’ to rescue these poor souls, I want you to get access to a recent documentary called ‘On her shoulders‘. And I want you to watch it carefully (I just came back from a screening at the Canadian War Museum).
It is the story of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi young woman whom IS terrorists tore from her family in the village of Kocho back in 2014, who witnessed the killing of her kin and others, was brutally raped and sold into sexual slavery and eventually escaped. She is now a UN goodwill ambassador on human trafficking and is doing what she can to keep the plight of her people at the forefront of the world’s conscience.
To watch the film is hard. Not for its graphic content, which is mercifully absent, but for Ms. Murad’s story and the stories of thousands of other Yazidi women and girls, some as young as 10. She makes reference to what she witnessed done to those girls but there are no words to describe what grown men did in their sexual torture of so many innocent lives.
She tells of how many girls committed suicide rather than continue to suffer hellish abuse. She also gives voice to the genocide of her nation, for genocide it was. The perverted, toxic interpretation of Islam that IS practices saw the Yazidis as non-people that needed to be eliminated, except of course for the young women and girls that they used to satisfy their sexual urges.
Now go back to the IS women calling out to be ‘saved’. Look again at their stories of how they were ‘brainwashed’ or ‘coerced’ or ‘misguided’ or ‘just following orders’ (hmm, where have we heard that phrase before? In the aftermath of Nazi Germany: I wonder if their are parallels here?). Do that and try to convince me that we as a nation, as a government, as citizens should move heaven and earth to repatriate these women. Go ahead, try. I’ll wait.
The bottom line is that the surviving ‘women of IS’ are not victims: they are victimisers. Ms. Murad and the thousands of Yazidi men, women and children are the true victims. We must never forget that. Conflating the torturers and the tortured is beyond reproach. The women who joined IS were complicit by definition with the crimes against humanity that heinous terrorist group committed. They do not deserve our sympathy or our efforts to repatriate them. They deserve to be tried and incarcerated. They must pay for their actions. Sure, maybe one day they will repent and be able to rejoin society, but not until after they have answered for their crimes.
I will leave the last words to Ms. Murad. She wants those who did what they did to her and to her people to be held accountable. She wants justice. She wants the world to recognise the genocide visited upon her people by IS. So who are you to say any differently?
Those advocating for the ‘moral obligation’ to bring female IS terrorists home might want to check with Ms. Murad first.
