… amazement and admiration, and here he goes again. After arranging, last March, the release of a Canadian child from a camp in Syria holding ISIS women and children, Peter Galbraith has arranged the release of her mother from the same camp. The woman is in Iraq, and it’s not clear that she’ll be allowed into Canada.
What’s most important, I think, is that Peter goes to some trouble to justify the woman’s release:
“This was a special case,” said Galbraith, “because [she] was one of a group of women who had very much broken with the dominant Islamic State ideology in the camps, wearing Western clothes and rejecting it, so she was at risk.”
He also said she’d been instrumental in helping officials locate a missing Yazidi child in one of the camps.
These are the sorts of conditions which UD (who has been unsympathetic to some internees as they ask for repatriation) expects to see when, special case by special case, releases from the camps begin to accelerate. This woman put the interest of her child before her own; she cooperated in important ways with officials; and she has been very overt about her rejection of ISIS doctrine. We can never know for sure, of course, that any given adherent or former adherent won’t go back to ISIS; but we can certainly demand an extremely high level of evidence that they won’t.
June 30th, 2021 at 11:26AM
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