There’s a lot of attention on ISIS at the moment thanks to all the hype around Shamima Begum’s pleas to be allowed back home to the UK and it’s had a knock on effect of bringing some other dumb stories about the organisation to the forefront of the news like this one featuring a family who somehow joined ISIS by mistake.
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Well, this is the story that 51 year old Safiya Zaynad and her daughters Shabina Aslam, 29, and Alireza Sabar, 17 are sticking to at least. Shabina says she thought that the three of them were going on holiday to Turkey, but then somehow ended up in Syria:
We don’t know how it happened and since then we have been trying to escape, but it has not been possible.
We all miss our life before, we miss freedom, independence, no fear.
We want to go back to England, back to my family, I want my children to have a normal life.
You can’t trust anyone, we asked the Syrians and Iraqis to leave but no one wanted to help us. The culture was completely different.
The Arabs never help the women, they just pushed them towards marriage.
Yeah I mean that isn’t really explaining how in the hell they just ended up in the wrong country as members of ISIS does it? It all sounds a bit fishy to me and this attitude is confirmed by Safiya’s old husband Sabar Aslam who stills lives in Manchester who reckons they knew what they were getting themselves into the whole time:
They left me four years ago and that’s the end of the story. She wasn’t happy with me.
They are not brave people they are very soft people. I don’t think they would be joining something like Isil.
The police have interviewed me many times. They asked me questions about them but they never said they were in Syria.
I thought she had gone to Saudi Arabia as all the time Safiya was talking about it. I thought she went there.
Yeah, kinda sounds like she just wasn’t having a fun time over here with her husband so packed her bags and went off to join ISIS, which a bizarrely large number of people seem to have done for some reason. Can’t really understand why because it looks like it would be really crap and awful and most of the people who’ve joined just complain about it and say they want to head back to where they came, but there you go.
For more of the same, check out Danny Dyer’s thoughts on it all. Can’t beat him.