Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

The fact is, no country wants its ISIS citizens back. To afford them due process is costly and time-consuming; evidence is often inadmissible or hard to come by. This makes it difficult to prosecute every ISIS woman or fighter who has committed atrocities, and the risk is that courts will have to allow many to go free or to impose light sentences. But equally there is no mechanism to account for the violence and coercion many members endured themselves at the hands of the group. How to sieve out the regretters and the dissenters, those who were appalled at what they found in the Islamic State and tried to escape but could not? Most Western countries have been content to make their ISIS citizens the problems of others—the Syrian Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, the Iraqi criminal justice system. To inflict this on fragile countries already deeply securitized and struggling to recover from years of war is immoral; it also runs the risk of allowing ISIS members, men and women alike, to receive vengeance-as-justice or perhaps even worse, no justice at all. It was perhaps clear from early on in the conflict that Western nations had ceased viewing their ISIS citizens as their citizens at all. States like Britain, France, and the United States passed on “kill lists” early in the war to the Iraqi military. A British official said openly that “unfortunately, the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”