Western governments have been urged by a terrorism thinktank to encourage fighters to defect from Islamic State with measures including offering them protection against reprisals. In a report published on Monday,
the British-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation
and Political Violence (ICSR) said that global lawmakers need to remove
legal “disincentives” to those wishing to speak publicly about their
newfound hostility to Isis, whose reach spreads across Syria, Iraq and
parts of other countries around the world.
Controversially, the King’s College London thinktank, which has been
at the forefront of tracking the movement of jihadis from the UK and
other countries to the Syrian civil war, also recommends that western
governments encourage defectors to leave Isis-held territory and then
protect them against reprisals.
Entitled Victims, Perpetrators, Assets: the Narrative of Islamic
State Defectors, the report says governments should “provide defectors
with opportunities to speak out; assist them in resettlement and ensure
their safety; and remove legal disincentives that prevent them from
going public”.
The Belgian father who went to Syria to help his Isis defector son return home – video
Peter Neumann, ICSR director and the report’s author, said new legal
frameworks had to be devised to support and encourage such defections.
“It
seems to me to be wrong that if someone is helping to deter people to
join Isis by casting a negative light on the group, that he is then
being punished for it,” Neumann said. “Right now, if you speak out, the
prosecutor will say, ‘oh that’s very interesting, so he’s admitting
membership of Isis, so we can prosecute him for that.’ So that needs to
stop.
“We’re not asking for the creation of legal incentives, saying ‘if
you tell a nice story you get an amnesty,’ but people right now are
being actively punished for speaking out and I think that needs to
change.
“Lawyers need to figure out a solution for that so people are no longer disincentivised for that.”
Commenting on the report, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism
legislation, David Anderson, said the Crown Prosecution Service already
had the flexibility to deal with such issues.
“Joining Isis or encouraging support for them is a serious terrorist
offence, and should remain so. The fact that someone has defected, or
provided useful intelligence, may already be taken into account in
deciding whether it is in the public interest to prosecute an
individual, or in passing sentence.”
The ICSR lists 58 recorded incidents of public defections from Isis
between January 2014 and August this year. While more than a third (21)
of those have been Syrians and nearly a quarter from other parts of the
Middle East, the ICSR says nine individuals from western Europe and
Australia have given interviews to the media about their reasons for quitting the extremist group.
Given the risks of prosecution, alienation and reprisal attacks from
Isis, Neumann said that, although the motives for why people have come
forward are undoubtedly varied, the narratives for leaving Isis are
“pretty consistent” with four themes.
Neumann
said the main one centres around how “brutal Isis is towards the very
people they are pretending to protect” – Sunni Muslims in the region.
Other reasons for quitting, the report says, include that Isis is
more interested in fighting fellow Sunni Muslim radicals, tribes and
civil organisations than Syria’s Assad government, that it is “corrupt
and un-Islamic” and that life under Isis “is harsh and disappointing”.
The centre says the 58 defectors are likely to represent a much
larger group who have yet to come out publicly. In August last year, one
Briton who was too frightened to return to the UK, and whom ICSR did
not record as a public defector, told researcher Shiraz Maher: “Muslims
are fighting Muslims … Assad’s forgotten about. The whole jihad was
turned upside down.”
The report says that the defections, although limited in overall
numbers, “have been sufficiently frequent to shatter Isis’s image as a
united, cohesive and ideologically committed organisation”. It adds that
the pace of public defections has increased in recent months: almost
60% of the cases were reported in the first eight months of 2015, 17 of
which appeared this summer.
Neumann said the study should have implications for western
counter-extremism policy. “None of the defectors talk about Christians
or Yazidis being executed, they don’t care about that. The brutality
they are outraged about is brutality against Sunnis.”
He said that though it might not be the most encouraging finding,
policymakers had to accept that hardened radicals weren’t going to
convert to liberal humanitarianism.
“If you want to stop people from joining Isis, there’s no point in
showing pictures of ethnic and religious minorities being persecuted.
Maybe you have to start talking about how Isis is actually bad to
Sunnis. Maybe that will have more of an effect.”
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