Let’s face it, the ISIS wives would not be returning to Australia if the Islamist extremist head-lopping Caliphate was still at large in Syria and Iraq.
Someone in charge of Australia needs to state, once and for all, that Australian-dual citizens who joined ISIS – or any other similar hostile foreign state – now, or in the future, will ever be permitted to return.
Instead, the charade continues.
One of the West’s flaws is allowing our system to be exploited by people who apparently hate our country and the peaceful citizens within it. These same people have demanded the rights and privileges that they denied to the victims of the ISIS regime and its horrific Jihad.
How many well-meaning donors to Save the Children knew their support would be used to lobby the Australian government to accept members of ISIS after those women flew over 10,000 kilometres to join one of the most evil ideological movements of modern times? To many quiet Australians, it doesn’t make sense.
An Arab proverb says, ‘A fool may be known by six things: anger without cause, speech without profit, change without progress, inquiry without object, putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.’
There is now a seventh: allowing dual nationals who joined a terrorist death cult to have their Australian citizenship restored and be repatriated at taxpayers’ expense. The creators of the proverb probably didn’t anticipate any government being that foolish.
The return of the ISIS wives follows a High Court ruling in June of this year that found stripping suspected Islamic State member Delil Alexander of Australian citizenship was unlawful under the Australian Citizenship Act 2007. As a result, 20 other Australian dual-national ISIS members are eligible to seek a return to Australia. The message, and the law, should be unequivocal (as it has been for most nations from the dawn of history): if you join an enemy of Australia as a dual national then you have forfeited the right to be a citizen.
This must be a national security red line for Australia, as well as the limit of common sense – not just for these alleged terrorists, but for the future.
Australia has zero responsibility for those who joined ISIS to fight or ran off to marry them. Why would we repatriate a single passport-burning traitor who volunteered to join a group of murderous criminals who have committed multiple crimes against humanity, including genocide and slavery?
If you want to do your thing for humanity, start with the homeless or women and children in Australia who remain trapped in a cycle of poverty.
Save the children at home.
Anyone who doesn’t believe these people joined a borderless war of grand strategy is reckless in their analysis. It is a playbook shaped by the al Qaeda strategist, Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery which involves bringing the debate down to the sorry plight of the Australian ISIS wives and fighters caught in Northern Syria detention camps ignores the scale of this conflict.
As Prussian War theorist, Carl von Clausewitz’s (1780-1831) outlined, ‘War is a continuation of politics by other means, where the act of violence is intended to compel the enemy to do our will.’
We are the enemy; but now the Jihad is over, we are the ‘friend’.
As the Pashtu proverb goes, an intelligent enemy is better than a foolish friend. Those who joined this movement sought to serve the objective of this savagery. If not for the destruction of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, these people would not want to return to the land of Kafir, or infidels.
At least 1,000 foreign nationals are being held in makeshift prisons in northern Syria. Unsurprisingly, those who signed up to the Jihad caravan have found their desire for paradise is not so strong. And if they remain committed to the narrative then surely the new Caliphate is Afghanistan or other Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Malaysia.
Australian taxpayers should not be responsible for them. During a 2018 Australian-US ministerial consultation the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, described three things that make these terror groups interconnected and transregional: ‘The flow of foreign fighters, the flow of resources and their message. I call that the connective tissue, and you have to cut that connective tissue.’ Resources include all those who make a contribution to the Islamic State’s social and ideological global ecosystem.
Of course, detained ISIS brides and fighters now claim they ‘didn’t really mean it’. One British-born and raised recruit told Sky News from his Syrian detention centre that he only played PlayStation and rode his bike around.
In 1942, George Orwell wrote:
‘If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, “He that is not with me is against me.” The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.’
Orwell’s conclusion should apply to all who joined ISIS.
There is some inference or indeed acceptance, that our perception of risk should be lowered because it is women who are returning and not fighting aged males – for now. They have been presented as the soft edge of ISIS. Many women led the ISIS enforcement brigades on the streets of Raqqa and some of the harshest enforcers were foreigners. Even those not directly involved in killing, but supported the terrorists’ efforts, are no less culpable. There are no grey zones.
While the vast field of terrorism research is unable to define the exact personality that makes a terrorist, zero evidence exists that individuals with no connection to, or influence from, the outside world wake up one morning and decide to become suicide bombers and truck-driving terrorists. The one common factor is a link to an ideology or cause, often introduced through friends, family members, or a charismatic figure artful at identifying and grooming impressionable recruits.
As reported in 2019, by The Heritage Institute (a US think-tank), in Europe even when a returning Jihadi is found with incriminating evidence on their possession, such as pictures of crucified or beheaded bodies and documents where they bragged about being a sniper, guess what? They will be out of prison in a little over seven years.
In Australia’s legal system you are innocent until proven guilty. Prosecution requires a high burden of proof. Trials could last months while they are recognised as heroes by Islamists in Australia. Self-appointed countering violent extremist experts will convince us they can be rehabilitated through boxing or woodwork classes. Any one of them could be the next brain surgeon.
Presented by The Australian, ABC Q&A guests, various lawyers/academics/NGOs, and Members of Parliament – are various pleas that ISIS members be given a fair go. They’re the victims. It was Australia’s fault they felt disenfranchised…
Recall when the ISIS insurgency metastasised around the world. We had to endure the nonsense of not calling them Islamist extremists. That was offensive; Islamophobic. Never mind that ISIS raped hundreds of Yazidi women, sold others as sex slaves, and beheaded NGO aid workers while throwing gay men off buildings.
In 1989 William Lind, co-author of 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, explained how our Western democratic system offers a haven from which groups that hate us can promote their objective of destroying our way of life while that same system protects their right to do so.
Targeting the terrorists’ long-term strategic intent requires an unequivocal position. Starting with a clear and simple rejection of appeals to return. We must destroy their fantasy at every level. Destroying that fantasy begins with explicit consequences. If you leave Australia to join a terrorist organisation, it is a one-way ticket. We need new modalities to face up to the changing nature of global conflict. To flip a Mao Zedong (1893-1976) metaphor of revolutionary warfare we must remove the fish and drain the water. Like any insurgency, these individuals and their political ideology retain support from enough people who live among us to enable the movement to survive.
There will be another wave of extremist Islamist violence. The threat has been metastising since the 13th century Sunni Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiyyah began preaching his interpretation of Islam. Ever since it has ebbed and flowed in a reformation movement. First from within Muslim countries through the likes Islamist preacher Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the 1970s to become a global insurgency. Before being killed in mid-2003, Saudi-born Shaykh Youssef Al-Ayyiri, one of al Qaeda’s key strategists and best communicators said, ‘The war is based on a strategy to widen the battlefield. The entire world has become a battlefield and not in theory.’ It is a fight beyond time and geography.
Just like the frog, Australia is a generous and compassionate nation to those who need our help. Let’s not piggyback scorpions, whose nature may revert when the next wave of the Islamist extremist global insurgency takes shape.
