Imam says Trinidad women, children who left for Syria are not war criminals

(Trinidad Guardian) Many of the lo­cal women and chil­dren who trav­elled to Syr­ia to fight for the Is­lam­ic ter­ror group Isis were forced to do so, ac­cord­ing to lo­cal Imam Sher­az Ali.

It was for this rea­son, his group, Con­cern Mus­lims of T&T are lob­by­ing gov­ern­ment to as­sist in the re­turn of at least 40 cit­i­zens who went to join the war in Syr­ia.

 
Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew, Ali said that a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor from the USA had claimed that there were 130 lo­cal Mus­lims who went across to Syr­ia; 39 men, 39 women and 52 chil­dren.

While he said there may be a stig­ma at­tached, Imam Ali said there is no ev­i­dence that they even took part in the war.

“Has there been any re­port of any Trinida­di­an woman or chil­dren be­ing in­volved in fight­ing for Isis? It has on­ly been men. There are no re­ports of women or chil­dren. The women fol­lowed their hus­bands. Most of them did. I am not say­ing that there are not some of those who would have gone ful­ly will­ing­ly, know­ing what they were go­ing to do, but it seems as though they were not even fight­ing. There are no re­ports of Trinida­di­an women fight­ing in the war in Syr­ia and we know that many of them who have con­tact­ed peo­ple in Trinidad and To­ba­go are plead­ing to come back. Most of them, their hus­bands have died,” Ali said.

It is es­ti­mat­ed that there are 73,000 fam­i­ly mem­bers of ter­ror­ist fight­ers liv­ing in a camp out­side the city of al-Hol in north­east Syr­ia af­ter Isis was de­feat­ed by Syr­i­an and US forces back in March.

The ma­jor­i­ty com­pris­es of chil­dren and the wives of fight­ers, many of whom were killed or im­pris­oned.

Imam Ali de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion with fam­i­lies trapped in Syr­ia as a hu­man­i­tar­i­an cri­sis. He said that 90 per cent of those in the al-Hol were women and chil­dren.

He added that based on the in­for­ma­tion shared by hu­man­i­tar­i­an groups, they are liv­ing a life of squalor where there was not enough food. Ali claimed that some were vic­tims of hu­man traf­fick­ing.

T&T had been iden­ti­fied as a re­cruit­ment hub for Is­lam­ic ex­trem­ists in sev­er­al in­ter­na­tion­al pub­li­ca­tions.

Ali said that not even the imams in the var­i­ous masjids knew about this mi­gra­tion to fight in a war. He said many of the fight­ers left sur­rep­ti­tious­ly and found them­selves in a re­gret­table sit­u­a­tion.