Allowing British ISIS joiners to return without consequences sends a chilling message to extremists
15 May 2025, 08:47 | Updated: 15 May 2025, 08:50
Allowing British ISIS joiners to return to the UK with no consequences sends a chilling message to extremists.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
In the latest example of the UK’s laxity of approach to those who can enter our country with impunity, Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights has published a report entitled Accountability for Daesh Crimes, which chronicles that more than 400 British citizens who deserted this country to join ISIS in Iraq or Syria have apparently returned to our shores. If this was bad enough, it found that not one of them has been successfully prosecuted for the crimes they may have committed while in service of a terrorist movement that pledged to destroy our country.
There are really only two positions that can be taken on this matter with any logic.
The first is to prevent ISIS joiners from returning to the UK, using methodology like that employed with Shamima Begum, who was stripped of her citizenship for her act of treason and therefore removed of her right of return. Despite Begum’s supporters employing all sorts of legal sophistry, various courts agreed that that Begum had access to alternate Bangladeshi citizenship, would not therefore be rendered stateless by the move, and that the British Government was therefore entitled to prevent her return owing to the risk she posed to national security.
Opponents of this approach argued that Begum was a problem created in Britain, and that the UK should have taken responsibility for what happened and prosecuted her here instead. Others, of which I am one, believe that the UK has more than enough extremist or security problems here without choosing to re-import some from abroad. We emerged victorious.
But this approach will not work for all British ISIS recruits, some of whom will have hailed from backgrounds with no recourse to similar citizenship stripping. As a result, the Committee’s findings are quite shocking. Either we believe ISIS is an evil terrorist entity which committed mass human rights abuses – as has been documented by copious evidence and the testimony of survivors – or we do not.
If we do, and surely we all do, then it is incumbent on the British state to investigate the potential crimes that British ISIS joiners may have committed, and prosecute them. We have done this for Holocaust perpetrators, and the template therefore exists to bring to justice those who have slipped back into the UK, seemingly to the lives they tried to extinguish when they joined the death cult they paid fealty to. If that requires further legislation, then so be it; we cannot allow monsters to live among us without holding them to account for the crimes they have committed.
This is the morally right course of action to take and it is also the prudent one for the sake of national security. It should be self-evident that leaving the UK to join ISIS makes you a security threat. Allowing you to return with no consequences sends a chilling message to extremists: wait long enough and when the nation’s attention has waned, you’ll be able to resume life unencumbered by the consequences of your actions. It may even encourage such people to try their luck again.
If we can’t keep former terrorist group adherents out of the UK then we should at least give them a hostile return. Their victims demand it. And our futures require it.
________________
Alan Mendoza is a Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Henry Jackson Society.
LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.
To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk
