What do we do when they come back?

[Soph0571]

We have a problem. Misfits, the mentally ill, the vulnerable and the friendless were targeted by an extremist death cult, and some fell for the murderous hype. Current estimates suggest that around 600 British citizens travelled to Syria and Iraq to take part in the rather grandiosely named Islamic State. It was never Islamic, and it was never a State and I am very sure that these addled brained (generally very young) people got the shock of their lives when having finally found somewhere they think they belonged ended up in the middle of the harsh reality of an extreme and very nasty war.

Some of our pampered boys and girls started to come home before rather dramatic fall of ISIS’s ‘capital’. Of the 600 who are known to have travelled to Syria, at least 300 have returned. No doubt some have reappeared as a sort of extremist death cult missionary, to try and convince further young people to take a flight to almost certain death. Others, having looked left, looked right and realised they had made a HUGE mistake in believing the murderous hype they had been fed, are phoning Mummy and Daddy and begging for a plan that would enable them to escape the horrors they have landed themselves in and they desperately wish to return to the comfort and security of their homes. At this point many have nowhere else to go, other than home, as they risk capture and almost certain execution if they continue to hang out in either Iraq or Syria, heading back to blighty is almost certainly a much better option that that.

A couple of weeks ago the UK Defence Secretary said these boys and girls are legitimate targets who (and I am paraphrasing here) could not claim the protections of the state, that we should take them out on foreign soil to stop any risk to society if they return. So very right wing and hang the rule of law. State justified murdered cloaked in a respectable layer of national security is never a good plan in maintaining a civil society. These young people, may or may not be a security risk on return. But how will we know? We cannot jail all of them. We cannot follow all of them. Scarily, 300 of the young people who ran off to Syria in the couple of years where unknown to the Security Services before they left. Of course, they will now be known to Security Services when/if they return. What do we do with them when they inevitably come running home?