“I just want to go home.”
This isn’t the plea of a tired child at her first sleepover at a friend’s house. It’s the refrain from ISIS fighters and their families, currently being held in various prison camps by Kurdish fighters.
The Kurds would be only too happy to accommodate the requests for a plane ticket to whence they came, but it’s more complicated than a simple “See ya later.”
Western nations are increasingly reluctant to accept their own citizens back, preferring to leave them where they are. Canada is included in that group. While for a time the message from our government was to bring ISIS fighters home to face, well, we’re not sure what, the mood has shifted on Parliament Hill to one of “Let’s not be hasty.”
Immigration lawyer David Matas says revoking citizenship isn’t a simple thing to do.
“If you started to take away citizenship from anybody, … the right to retain citizenship would be meaningless. It would be subject to a constitutional challenge.”
But, what if an ISIS fighter holds dual citizenship? Must we bring them back to Canada?
“Canada doesn’t normally provide transportation to get back home, but telling them to go someplace else is foisting the problem on somebody else,” says Matas.
Terrorism expert Anne Speckhard has interviewed more than a hundred ISIS fighters.
“They’re completely disillusioned. The dream is broken. ISIS didn’t deliver. They’re corrupt. They’re overly brutal.”
This sentiment comes as no shock to the rest of us. The whole world knew what ISIS was and so it’s not as if these recruits weren’t warned.
So it’s a chore to muster up any sort of sympathy for these people who left peaceful western nations so they could slaughter innocent people in Syria and Iraq.
Then there’s the problem of the women and children of ISIS.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the little kids in these camps. They haven’t committed any crimes,” said Speckhard.
So do we bring the children and wives of ISIS fighters back to their countries of origin and leave the fighters in the hands of of the Syrian Democratic Forces?
This is where the situation becomes much more complex. If children in Canada get the kind of parenting that these kids have received, CFS would be knocking on the door and seizing those children.
The parents joined ISIS willingly, and even though they can claim they were duped, they still signed up. The children did not.
Speckhard says the women she’s interviewed are ready to come home and face the music, even if it means prison. They’ve seen the barbaric reality of ISIS and want no part of it.
The Syrian fighters who did the dirty work on the ground battling ISIS deserve some of our support. That means taking back the people we can, namely the women and children. If we leave the men to rot we still owe the Syrian Democratic Forces, known as the YPG, some support.
But we cannot tell a six or eight or ten-year-old child that the rest of their lives will be spent inside the barbed wire of a prison camp for crimes they did not commit.
WATCH: Dad lobbies government to bring alleged ISIS fighters to Canada
Comments