Should ISIS brides be allowed to come home?

Now that the caliphate of Islamic State/ISIS has collapsed, there are a lot of foreign wives of ISIS fighters who want to return to their home country. Because of this there is a discussion in Western countries whether or not these women should be allowed to return. In an interview with Buzzfeed News Pari Ibrahim, founder and executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, weighs in on this discussion and gives her view on the matter. She emphasises that a lot of these ’ISIS women’ were fully complicit in the torture of young Yezidi women and the enabling of their rape by ISIS fighters; a fact that a lot of people don’t seem to consider in this discussion. These ‘women of the caliphate’ are therefore far from innocent and should not be allowed to pick up their lives in our society like nothing happened. 

A quote from the interview:

‘Ibrahim said the torture of Yazidi women was often psychological, and the “ISIS wives” were “incredibly cruel” in this regard. One of the younger Yazidi survivors told Ibrahim that a woman had “forbidden” her from crying, although the Yazidi woman’s entire family had been massacred by ISIS fighters. Others spoke about how women who were part of ISIS forced them to recite the Qur’an and denounce their own religion.

“In some cases, [the wives] were the ones who made women shower and put on clean clothes and makeup before they were brought to the men to be raped,” Ibrahim said via email from Washington, DC. “They were absolutely complicit, and they knew very well what they were doing.”’ You can read the entire interview here:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nishitajha/isis-yazidi-shamima-begum-hoda-muthana