generalspeaking

Kazakhstan Leading the Way

"They [the government of Kazakhstan] want to know if we are dangerous."
"I want the world to know it's wholly realistic to rehabilitate us."
"It was like your mother forgot to pick you up from kindergarten, but then remembered and came back for you."
Aida Sarina, 25, ISIL mother of young son

"It's a success when they accept guilt, when they promise to relate to nonbelievers with respect and when they promise to continue studying."
"We don't offer 100 percent guarantees. If we manage to achieve 80 percent success, that is still success."
Alim Shaumetov, director, NGO Rehabilitation Center of Good Intentions

"Any potential security threats would have been much greater [if Kazakhstan left its citizens, especially the women and children, stranded in refugee camps in Syria]. For example, there is a risk of these women and children being exploited by radical extremist groups for various [purposes]."
"Now that they’re safely back in Kazakhstan, there is an opportunity to constantly work with the children, to influence them."
"Not a single child that returned from Syria was left without family support. All were taken in by their relatives."
Erlan Karin, adviser to Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev

"All of the driving reasons that caused a small number to fight abroad -- injustice, marginalization, repression -- still exist."
"Young people will seek new ways to express this frustration, sometimes using violence."
Edward Lemon, Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security, Washington, D.C.

Women who were an integral part of the Islamic State scheme of an ever-expanding caliphate meant to eventually conquer the world as a religious ideology of violent conquest in service to Islam's principle of jihad, the expression of proselytizing that the religion imposes as a primary obligation on the faithful, deny they were ever in any position to know ISIL's purpose and methods of operation. A byzantine psychopathic derangement of human nature falling to its lowest uncommon denominator. They were all victims of a gross misunderstanding.

All they did was follow instructions issued by their husbands who were, after all, the owners of their bodies and their minds, their very souls. One explanation that has been heard countless times is that young women were informed by their men that it was vacation time and Turkey awaited. Once there they were spirited into Syria where they joined other innocent young women whose occupation was simply to be a housewife and mother of young children. And at this they evidently excelled given the number of children produced.

Europe, which provided quite a number of willing recruits to the case of jihad, knows how many of their nationals sit in camps for the internally displaced operated by the Kurdish Syrian Defence Forces; not because they feel they are best suited for the role of international jailer, but because they have been left with no other choice. They it was who, with U.S. air power, succeeded in defeating the ISIL terrorists, and now they have them in custody and no other country steps forward to claim their own.

Kazakhstan does. Its population is 70 percent Muslim, but ISIL and its agenda is viewed by Kazakhstan authorities as an aberration, an abhorrent assault against Islam as much as it is against all whom the terrorists consider their enemies. And Kazakh officials evidently believe in the powers of rehabilitation. They are prepared to expend time, energy and professional expertise on convincing the ISIL women the manner of their errors in judgement, and to turn them around and away from the destructive ideology most saw as their ideal realized.

A woman evacuated from the last territory held by ISIL militants carries two children after being screened by the SDF outside Baghouz, Syria on February 26, 2019 [File: AP/Felipe Dana] [Daylife]

Men too, are being accepted for return. Their immediate fate is arrest along with a ten year prison term should they agree to return. Evidently the prospect was not enthusiastically embraced by the men, most of whom spurned the offer and chose to remain prisoners of the SDF.

Without knowing whether deradicalization will succeed, Kazakhstan is proceeding with the effort to attempt to have it work, in lieu of arresting and imprisoning women and effectively leaving their children orphans. A small hotel in western Kazakhstan's desert is full of these returned ISIL women. Who just happen to be regarded by most governments as suspects in terrorism, a suspicion well earned.

The treatment site is named the Rehabilitation Center of Good Intentions where nannies look after the children, are fed hot meals and given attention by doctors and psychologists. Professionals at the rehabilitation center persuade the women to open up verbally about their experiences. "We teach them to listen to the negative feelings inside" Lyazzat Nadirshina, one psychologist explained.

With the reasoning that the women's radical intentions would harden were they to be thrown into prison the services are geared primarily to protect the greater society they will eventually once again become part of; solving the women's pathological view of Islamist supremacy and violence and hatred directed at others a requirement of the faithful in Islam, is a secondary albeit important aspect to the treatment process.

The truth is, as the analysis of radicalism understands these are not innocent young women terrorized themselves by controlling husbands. Some of these women themselves became fighters, others spokeswomen engaging in recruiting other women abroad to travel to Syria to join the caliphate and become 'brides' themselves of terrorist jihadists. Even those who merely and meekly remained at home to take care of housewifely duties nurtured the terrorist impulses of their husbands, thus becoming an integral part of the whole.

As for Ms. Sarina, she claims to have been cured. When fighting in Raqqa intensified her husband was killed, and she was placed in the 'house of widows', eventually to be taken by an ISIL official evacuating widows, to the desert where they were all abandoned, according to her narrative. They ate grass to survive, while some of their children froze to death on cold nights. She is now prepared to mentor other returning women to Kazakhstan, informing them that ISIS failed to protect them.

Labels: Islamic State, Kazhakstan, Rehabilitation

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, August 20, 2019