WUNRN
UK – DOUBLE BLOW FOR PARENTS OF JIHADISTS: LOSING THEIR
CHILDREN TO THE TERRORIST MOVEMENT, THEN THEIR COMMUNITY’S DISTANCING
DEC. 27, 2014
UK - Manchester - Everyone at the Alfurqan Islamic Center knows of the
parents who tried to rescue their twin daughters after the girls ran off to
join the Islamic State.
They know how Ibrahim Halane and his wife, Khadra Jama, who are immigrants
from Somalia, followed their daughters to Turkey. How Ms. Jama, who ventured
into Syria after them, was arrested by the militants and detained for more than
five weeks. How the parents came back empty-handed, their 17-year-old
daughters, Salma and Zahra, already married off to jihadists.
They know the story, and they sympathize. But they keep their distance.
“We know he’s upset, and everyone feels sorry for him,” Haji Saab, chairman
of the mosque, said of Mr. Halane. But “we leave him alone.”
It has been very difficult for the community as well, Mr. Saab said. It has
“shut itself up.”
“People are traumatized,” he said.
About 3,000 men and women are believed to have left Europe since the Syrian
war intensified to join up with militant groups like the Islamic State. While
their loved ones hope for their safe return, the authorities throughout most of
Europe are taking steps to stop them, amid fears that they will recruit others
or bring violence back with them.
But in many cases they have already created turmoil for their families and
communities, say those familiar with the people left behind. Not only do
parents like the Mr. Halane and Ms. Jama live with the worry that they will
never again see their children — many of whom are just teenagers — but they
must also endure isolation and fear.
And with the authorities unhelpful — and largely unsympathetic — in most
cases, more families are taking matters into their own hands and trying to go
to Syria to rescue their children themselves.
“Even their relatives are ignoring them because they are frightened of
being associated with so-called terrorists and of being arrested,” said Saleha
Jaffer, who runs Families Against Stress and Trauma, a London-based
organization that helps families of children who have joined the Middle East
conflict.
Many, like the Halane family, are keeping to themselves. At the Alfurqan
Islamic Center one recent morning, Mr. Halane, who occasionally teaches there,
was in a classroom, throwing questions at a group of young boys, who responded
in lively unison. But he frowned as he emerged with his students.
“Please, you must go away,” he said in a low, trembling voice, as the
students stopped chatting and listened in. “I have nothing to say, except that
if they want to come back, they can,” he said, referring to his daughters.
“If they don’t,” he paused, and flicked his hand as if to brush them away.
He turned his back without finishing his sentence.
The trauma is particularly acute among Somalis. Somalis are struggling with
the lure of Islamic extremism on multiple fronts: More than 100 Britons are
thought to have joined the Shabab, an Islamist group in Somalia, according to
the intelligence services.
A person who knows the Halane family said that another one of the children,
a son, had gone to Somalia to fight with the Shabab, but then moved to Syria
and joined the Islamic State last year.
Ms. Jaffer said the stigma faced by families was acute. Families know they
are gossiped about and shunned. Some siblings refuse to go to school because
they are afraid of being bullied.
Part of her organization’s work is to help the families rejoin their
communities by persuading others they will not be punished if they show support.
But so far, the convincing has been difficult.
Activists said governments were making the problem worse with their plans
for tighter antiterror laws, more stop-and-searches, and the 12-year prison sentences handed
down in Britain recently to two returning jihadists after their
families cooperated with the police. The policies are discouraging others from
coming forward, community activists say. The police have arrested 271 people on
terrorism-related charges so far in Britain this year.
“No one is talking about their impact on families and the communities,”
said Mohammed Shafiq, the chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation in
Manchester, which aims to discourage young people from joining the Islamic
State. “The government just has a series of knee-jerk reactions.”
He said that one consequence of the authorities’ expanding antiterrorism
powers was that an increasing number of families had approached him for advice
on traveling to Syria on their own to fetch a daughter or son.
One father from Cardiff, Wales, was determined to bring back his
22-year-old son, who joined the Islamic State after traveling to the conflict
zone as an aid worker a year ago.
“He said he thought the police and the government were useless because they
weren’t of any help,” Mr. Shafiq said. “He had even contacted the local member
of Parliament, but didn’t get results.”
Mr. Shafiq dissuaded him. “I know you are suffering because your child is
gone,” he said he had told the father. But if Syrian government forces did not
capture him, he told him, Islamic State militants would. “It’s too dangerous.
Can you live with yourself knowing your other children would be orphans and
your wife a widow?”
“I rarely see grown men break down and cry,” recalled Mr. Shafiq. “He was
just so helpless.”
A family friend described the Halanes as a deeply religious family of 13.
They left Somalia, lived in Denmark for a while and then immigrated to Britain,
where the twins were top students and aspired to become doctors like an older sister,
who is a medical student in Denmark.
But in June the twins flew to Turkey and crossed the border into Syria. The
family friend, who works with the older sister at a charity in Denmark,
discovered their whereabouts, and their parents set off after them.
The friend, Ahmad Walid Rashidi, a Dane of Afghan origin, agreed to help.
In an interview, Mr. Rashidi said he and the father had made it as far as
Turkey when the father balked.
Though they had determined that the girls’ father was more likely to be granted
access to his daughters, their mother, Ms. Jama, who uses a different name from
her husband, insisted on making the journey.
“I have lost one son,” she told him. “So I don’t want to lose the twins.”
Mr. Rashidi said she had been focused on taking the girls back to Britain.
“She was not afraid of dying.”
They found the girls in Manbij, a Syrian city between Raqqa and al-Bab,
which is said to be popular among European fighters of the Islamic State. But
Ms. Jama’s efforts to encourage her daughters to return were thwarted when she
discovered they had already been married.
Soon after, militants arrested her and Mr. Rashidi on suspicion of being
Western spies. They were detained in separate jails for 36 days, an experience
that Mr. Rashidi plans to recount in a book to be published next April.
According to Mr. Rashidi, at their subsequent trial in a court of the
Islamic State, Ms. Jama’s optimism began to weaken. “She started looking scared
that she’ll never see her daughters again,” he recalled.
Her daughters told the court and their mother that their hearts belonged to
Islam and that they did not want to return to Britain. The girls’ husbands
would also have to give their permission for them to return home, Mr. Rashidi
said, and “they were not ready to do that.”
The court ultimately released the mother and Mr. Rashidi, and they were
allowed to return to Turkey. Ms. Jama flew back to Manchester.
One of the Islamic State judges said: “We didn’t ask your twins to come
here,” Mr. Rashidi recalled. “They came here because you taught them” to be
religious.
As they left, Mr. Rashidi said, a dejected Ms. Jama murmured: “Fi
sabilillah.” The expression, which comes from the Quran, means, “for the sake
of God.”