Let them join ISIS

By Sumantra Maitra
0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, February 26, 2015
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From left: Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum



Three British private school girls recently left for Turkey to move to Syria to join ISIS. Apparently they were lured by another British lady, over Twitter. This was not the first time British or Western girls have moved to ISIS territory to be a part of the group. Some of them are white converts to Islam, but mostly they are from Muslim families of migrants, ranging from Pakistan and Afghanistan, to Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Some of them are lured to be Jihadi brides, some of them go for adventure in uncharted terrain, almost all of them go with a belief in an idealized version of an Islamic society, where people are God fearing, and the women subservient.

This kind of psychology is hard to explain from a modern perspective. These girls grew up in the same generation with their fellow sisterhood listening to One Direction or Justin Bieber or other interminable dross that passes on as music these days. How did they end up on the other side of the fence? British Conservative Tory MP Dr Sarah Wollaston summed it up in her tweets, when she said she had "no sympathy for these A-grade girls." "Joining ISIS knowingly colludes with their grotesque mass murders, enforced slavery, torture and rape. No one can claim not to know"…she said.

Calls for introspection also started immediately after the girls were known to fly to Turkey. Did Britain and the West fail in integrating the minorities, or were the minorities failing to assimilate into the society they chose to migrate to for a better life, and instead decided to stay in their own community cocoon and bred victimhood? Turkey blasted the United Kingdom, pointing out lapses in monitoring, inviting criticism from the United Kingdom along the same lines. The intelligence agencies were skewered by the media, as they failed to take note of teenagers, chatting to marked and noted "persons of interest" related to terror incidents over Twitter. The kind of shock and disbelief was prevalent, as is always the case, whenever a "normal" middle class urban professional is found to be working for ISIS or other Islamist terrorist groups, from the Boston bombers radicalized, to the chic Paris girlfriend and accomplice of the Charlie Hebdo attacker, to the Bengali engineer working in Bangalore, secretly for ISIS social media accounts.

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