American-born ISIS bride Hudah Mothana wants to come back to home sweet home, the USA, but we are not having her.
A woman who showed no mercy to others now seeks penance from the United States. As a Muslim woman who observes Islam myself, I say we should not show her mercy. The innocent victims of the ISIS genocide, the Yazidi people and the many Muslims who were held captive by the ISIS caliphate deserve that much.
I know because I have traveled to meet with ISIS survivors, including children and ISIS brides enslaved for forced marriage.
It was spring in Duhok, Kurdistan one sunny morning last year when I met with a Kurdish child. Abducted by ISIS in the summer of 2014, the group took him to the abandoned cinema in Mosul, and with dozens of other Kurdish children, he was taken captive to become a child soldier. Finally, over three years later, the child was in front of me as I consulted in the office of his psychologist.
Reunited with his father, the 14-year-old Yazidi boy still struggled with depression, insomnia and dissociation. What he missed most of all was his mother, who was still missing along with over 3,800 other Yazidi women taken as ISIS brides or sex slaves. Many families were too poor to pay the ransom money ISIS demanded, and they do not know what has become of their women.
When I return to Iraqi Kurdistan this spring, many of these mothers and children will still be missing.
The indigenous, ancient Yazidis have confronted extinction through generational genocide — which has included aborting pregnancies conceived with their Yazidi husbands before they were massacred by ISIS. Dozens of Western Muslim women traveled from wealthy first-world countries to assist in their massacre. Those include Mothana — the daughter of a Yemeni diplomat — and Britain’s Shamima Begum, who burned her British passport on the way to Islamist nirvana.
The women have failed to display any contrition, exhibiting perverse confidence in their entitlement to return home.
These women enforced degrading, abusive conditions on the Yazidi women, who were held prisoner in ISIS slave houses. “In some cases, [the wives] would lock our Yazidi women in the houses so they could not escape. They would force them to do manual labor, humiliate them in captivity; they were beaten and tortured by the ISIS wives,” said Pari Ibrahim, executive director of the Free Yazidi Foundation.
Western women carried special cachet as a measure of the potency, allure and draw of ISIS itself. Why would Aqsa Mahmood a young woman from Glasgow, leave behind Harry Potter, Coldplay and a private school to join ISIS — unless it was obviously the righteous path for Muslim women?
Now that the caliphate is “kaput,” millennial jihadists want to come “home.”
As a Muslim, I am not alone in my desire to see these women permanently excommunicated from Western nations.
Islam sees individuals as having both rights and responsibilities. One of the central duties of a Muslim includes the duty to society — to preserve and protect the integrity of the society one calls home.
After blasphemy, the most heinous sin in Islam is the desecration of society — the uprooting of a peaceful dwelling. In Islam, this is known as “fasad fi al-ard.” In Arabic, it means the corruption of Earth and the destruction of the beauty of creation.
These women did not commit mere murder. They left with the express intention of uprooting others through sedition and incitement to enter into the caliphate. No less than crucifixion, as a deterrent to other offenders, was once the recommended punishment for such an offense. The fact we have not pursued the capital punishment that Islam demands of such evildoers means we have already shown mercy to these miserable wretches.
However, thanks to leaders in the West — especially Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and British Home Secretary Sajed Javed, who is Muslim himself — these women will not be allowed to return home.
Later this spring, I will return to Duhok in Kurdistan and meet with the Yazidi boy who is now recovering. His mother may still be missing, but I have the assurance that the ISIS brides who played a role in holding her captive have no quarter in Iraq, Syria, Britain or the United States. This makes me proud to be both a British Muslim and an American Muslim.
Qanta A. Ahmed (@MissDiagnosis) is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Committee on Combating Contemporary Anti-Semitism Through Testimony at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller
