LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine) – According to a parliamentary report released on Thursday, there is “compelling evidence” that Daesh trafficked women and children of Britain against their will.Â
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Trafficked Britons in Syria concluded after a six-month investigation that Daesh was able to traffic women and children as young as 12 due who were vulnerable to systemic failures by UK public entities.
The investigation discovered evidence of the UK police and other authorities’ “siloed approach to counter-terrorism and anti-trafficking,” which meant “important decision-makers had been unsuccessful in recognising indicators of grooming and that young vulnerable girls were at risk of being taken out of the nation by traffickers.”
Approximately 20 British families are now detained in camps administered by Kurdish in Syria.
The majority of those women, according to the NGO Reprieve, are victims of human trafficking and have been forced to endure sexual and other forms of exploitation after they were brought to Syria as youngsters, coerced into travelling there, or moved and kept within the nation without their consent.
“The government’s approach to British nationals detained in Syria is morally reprehensible, legally dubious and utterly negligent from a security perspective.” Andrew Mitchell, Conservative MP, co-chair of the APPG, stated.
Because of security concerns, the Home Office has been sluggish to remove citizens in those camps, instead stripping them of their citizenship.
This strategy was unsustainable, Mitchell added, citing recent IS (Daesh) raids on Kurdish detention facilities as an exampleThe United States has told the UK to bring these families homes, and their allies from Europe have demonstrated how to do so. Any ministers still sticking to the current strategy that clearly failed, would do better to study this report, which clearly sets out the potentially disastrous consequences of further inaction.
The APPG warned that such victims may be in face of violent ideologies, re-trafficked somewhere else, or the facility that was keeping them could be breached — the way it happened in the Daesh attack on a jail in Hasakah — and that keeping them there could jeopardise the worldwide counter-terrorism operation.
In one of the cases, British police, school officials, and health care providers all knew that a number of girls were facing domestic violence in their home and that the father had taken them out of school.
But it took a month for the local administration to raise “safeguarding concerns” with the doctor of the family and fill out a child-missing-education form after they were transported to Syria.
Likewise, one more girl was stopped from going out of the country with a man who most certainly wasn’t a member of the family, the authorities, however, did not inform her family, and she left the next day.
Her family believes had the authorities informed them that she was about to travel to Syria, they could have stopped her.
The UK, like many other countries, has been debating what to do with Daesh recruits who have become stranded in Syria.
Wherever feasible, London has made a choice to prevent them from returning by stripping them of their citizenship, like in the instance of Shamima Begum, who flew to Syria as a youngster and now says she was a victim of human trafficking.
