Unpalatable as it seems, justice must prevail – even when it comes to Daesh

It’s remarkable after all how many foreigners who willingly joined the ranks of this most brutal of terror groups, when finally confronted with its decline and accountability for their own part in its barbarism, suddenly plead remorse, regret or say they were duped into joining?

READ MORE: Jack McConnell backs Daesh woman's return to Britain plea

In their defence some claim to have never been fully convinced by Deash’s aims or quickly became disillusioned, even though they often stayed with its ranks for years.

This is not the Islam I believed in, they contest. The actions carried out in its name are not those I could accept or condone they insist now by way of explanation.

They themselves of course were never one of the really bad guys, never a member of those cadres who beheaded, raped, tortured and killed randomly.

Listening to such accounts I often can’t help being reminded of those countless Germans who after the end of the Second World War, always insisted they had no truck with Nazism.

I was just caught up in historical events went their reasoning, I was never one of those “true believers”, one of those brainwashed, jackboot wearing SS types, who herded innocents into camps before starving and murdering them in their millions.

That wasn’t me that was someone else. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of my own misfortune, ultimately misled, they say.

In the wake of that bygone war some would even insist they knew nothing about such dark goings on in places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald or Belsen.

Today that’s an excuse that those who lived or fought within Daesh’s ranks certainly don’t have when it comes to explaining away the horrors they inflicted in cities under their control like Mosul in Iraq or Raqqa in Syria.

For many people the case of Shamima Begum, one of the London schoolgirls who left the UK in 2015 to join Daesh and who now wants to return to Britain, elicits little sympathy for precisely such reasons.

Listening to the interview with Begum, her seeming coldness, when she expresses “no regrets” or admitting that seeing “beheaded heads” in bins “didn’t faze her,” made such a reaction all the easier for many of us.

Most people are fortunate not to have encountered indoctrinated “jihadi brides” like Begum who was barely 15 years old when she and two friends went off to join the Daesh caliphate.

To reporters like myself such people are far from alien even if their motives on the face of it appear so.

Over the years while covering the war against Daesh, I’ve met jihadi brides like Begum face to face. I’ve also had the opportunity to witness first hand the grisly handiwork of these terrorists, much of it carried out by the menfolk with whom such women entered wedlock. Not that the “brides” were always so innocent of committing atrocities.

It was near the city of Mosul, held by Daesh for three years, in a camp for displaced people that a young Iraqi husband and wife, Salim and Shaima, told me of the day Daesh brought a man and tied him to a pole.

“Daesh had their women with them, muhajireen,” Salim recalled of that day, using the Arabic term for “migrants” or in this case foreign women who were members of the group.

“Once the man was tied, they fired bullets into the air as a signal for people in our neighbourhood to gather and watch,” Salim continued.

What followed next, the young couple told me, was a barbaric act that for over two and a half years they were forced to watch repeated with grotesque variations.

“It was a woman, one of the muhajireen, that this time slaughtered the man,” Salim explained.

The use of that word, “slaughter”, is significant in the Middle East, implying as it does the ritual slaughter of livestock carried out with a single cut to the throat and the animal dying slowly of blood loss.

Time and again I’ve listened to such accounts. I’ve seen too the remains of those murdered by Daesh dug up from mass graves.

In light of such atrocities it’s hardly surprising there is little public sympathy for those who voluntarily joined Daesh. By describing her time with Daesh as a “normal life”, recruits like Begum, even though a non-combatant, still helped give the group legitimacy and in so doing helped it recruit others.

As Shiraz Maher, London director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), has rightly pointed out, individuals like Begum who lent intangible support to Daesh through simply being there, represented a type of moral and propaganda victory for the group.

As he also says her case raises all kinds of complex questions as to our response to Begum’s desire to return to the UK. What should happen to fighters and should non-combatants be dealt with differently, especially if they are pregnant women groomed when they were children to join such an odious organisation?

Is it right to condemn children born or conceived in such circumstances to remain paying for the rest of their lives for the mistakes of their Daesh indoctrinated parents?

Difficult as it is to reconcile with the adult she is today, Begum was a child when she was groomed by Daesh. Even in our understandable reaction to her distasteful lack of remorse we should never lose sight of this fact.

In some ways her state of mind now is hardly surprising given the extent of Daesh brainwashing she and other youngsters like her underwent.

Just as she changed from the schoolgirl in Bethnal Green to the jihadi bride and supporter of such a twisted regime, who is to say rehabilitation cannot change her for the better again. At the very least it would give her as yet unborn child a chance to avoid the sickening world in which she found herself inhabiting.

Ultimately the fate of Shamima Begum and those like her are in the hands of others. I’m a reporter not a judge or politician and for that reason alone far from an apologist for the monsters of Daesh.

Having seen close up what their ilk are capable of, any other reaction is personally inconceivable and this before any of us stop to consider those victims of Daesh’s cruelty and viciousness. It goes without saying that those within their ranks accused of such crimes must whenever possible face justice and due punishment if convicted.

Flawed our system might be but it’s a far cry from the savage pretence of the one under which Daesh operates. Justice and its true existence after all is what in great part makes us more humane, reasoned and better than terrorists and extremists.