Learn more about Hervé Gourdel's activities, and see his photography, at http://www.hervegourdel.com/
When I wrote this comment piece for The National*, offering qualified support to the idea of re-integrating returning, repentant jihadists provided their involvement had stopped short of violent crime, Hervé Gourdel was the subject of a demand from his Islamic State-allied captors in Algeria that France should halt air strikes in northern Iraq if it wanted to save his life. France held firm and M Gourdel was murdered. A much-loved and honourable man, who lived for the mountains and who was due to share his passion and expertise with an Algerian group, was butchered by merciless fanatics with no honour, no courage and no humanity.
I know Saint-Martin-Vésubie, the beautiful village where he ran Escapade, a centre for mountain guides, set in the Alpes-Maritimes 90 minutes north of Nice. I offer my solidarity and sympathy to his family, friends and fellow mountaineers, hikers and guides. And yet, while I can see why others would disagree, I would not alter a word of the piece that follows ...
A young British woman described as a former medical student poses with a severed head in her right hand watched by children in the Syrian city of Raqqa. The caption reads: “Dream job, a terrorist doc.”
Young men torment their distraught families back in Wales by tweeting support for ISIL’s beheading of hostages, crucifixions of “non-believers” and acts of genocide. Aqsa Mahmood, a privately educated woman from a middle-class Pakistani family in Glasgow, fires off chilling messages acclaiming murders at the Boston marathon, inciting similar attacks on western streets.
The words and images are disturbing, as they are meant to be. But are these deranged, brainwashed individuals or evil young men and women with twisted notions of Islam to justify their war crimes in Syria and northern Iraq?
In my own younger days, the supposed depravity of youth was typically represented by rival gangs of gormless mods and rockers fighting on English seaside beaches, teenage promiscuity and drug-taking. Pity the poor Muslim parents of 2014, striving to live peaceful, law-abiding lives in the West, who see sons or daughters lured to foreign conflict as sworn enemies of the countries of their birth.
The disquiet of Muslim community leaders, and the wider public, is understandable. But there is a respectable case for a more thoughtful response from authority and politicians to these self-styled jihadists, whose indoctrination now begins in peer groups and online more commonly than under the influence of rogue preachers.
Rational voices are increasingly being raised in favour of offering an olive branch to those who have, as yet, committed none of the atrocities for which ISIL is so proud to admit responsibility.
To allow the genuinely disillusioned and repentant recruits to return to their home countries without fear of draconian punishment, so the argument runs, would create both a priceless source of information and an effective counterpropaganda tool. Who better to lecture impressionable youth on the dangerous folly of joining extremist groups than those who have seen at first hand what they do, what life in their company is like?
Realistically, it is too late for that medical student, with the obscene glorification of her own descent into depravity.
Others may also be beyond salvation or pardon. Surely there can be no amnesty for cowardly murderers of civilian hostages, perpetrators of outrageous acts of ethnic cleansing or those implicated in massacres of prisoners-of-war. Yet even these are moot points for some campaigners with sound experience of combating radicalisation on the housing estates and campuses where it often occurs.
Alyas Karmani, who co-directs the anti-extremist British group Street, based in London and Bradford, sees strong parallels with the child soldiers coerced into becoming active participants in African conflicts. The young foreigners drawn into combat in the Middle East are often “children or vulnerable young adults”, he says, thus a protection and safety issue rather than one for which crushing legal repercussions are the only official response. “Their approach is basically, ‘let them die, let them be killed’,” Karmani told The National, “and this is completely unacceptable.”
Perhaps no political leader would dare to go that far in the face of raw public anger at the inhumane detention and butchering of journalists, aid workers and other non-combatants. But in the absence of a coherent alternative strategy, it is hardly surprising that someone with as much experience in tackling extremism as Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence chief and UN counter-terrorism expert, should urge incentives for disaffected jihadists seeking a way out of the morass.
Without using the word amnesty, Mr Barrett proposes immunity from prosecution for individuals whose hands are not already stained by the blood of innocents, provided they cooperate with the authorities and agree to use their experiences to deter other would-be recruits.
According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College, London, among the 500 Britons estimated to have linked up with ISIL and other militant groups there are dozens desperate to return. With thousands of other young people, of assorted western nationalities, also in conflict zones, it is safe to assume that figure is conservative.
Before dismissing such steps as a direct challenge to the principles of justice, or for being “soft on terror”, governments ought to consider what is actually happening. Last weekend, two French girls, aged 16 and 17, were detained in Marseille while trying to reach Syria via Turkey, without the knowledge of their parents. They may not have seen the gruesome social media messages from British recruits, but they can hardly have been unaware, even before this week’s specific threats towards French citizens, that their own country is effectively at war with groups of the sort they wish to join.
It is at least possible that words of discouragement from a rehabilitated former combatant, properly assessed to ascertain credibility, would have stopped these girls from embarking on an escapade destined to lead them to serious criminality or early death.
* Reproduced with the editor's consent. See my work for The National at http://www.thenational.ae/authors/colin-randall
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