Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  The families were stunned and enraged in equal measure. The officers would show up at their houses with detailed, endless questions, and little information about the girls’ movements. Often the news media seemed better informed. The families began to feel like the police were vacuuming their lives and minds for intelligence, but were uninterested in actually getting the girls back—girls who were schoolchildren, who were British citizens.

  Shamima’s sister called the mosque, weeping. Shamima had constantly said she was going there—had anyone seen her? Could anyone not help? As Kadiza’s sister was going through her room, she found the letter from the police tucked inside a schoolbook. Through conversations with the liaison officers assigned to them by the police, it became clear that when Sharmeena disappeared in December, what had begun as a missing-person investigation quickly turned into a counterterrorism investigation. Their daughters had been questioned twice at school by counterterrorism police without their parents’ knowledge. When Kadiza’s sister confronted one of the police officers, he told her the girls had been “giving him the run-around.” She was incensed. Since when did teenage girls “run around” the most highly trained, competent police force in Europe?

  Finally the families stopped speaking to the police altogether. They went to the East London Mosque for help instead. One went to CAGE, a human rights group that offered advice to Muslims impacted by terrorism laws. The mosque introduced them to a lawyer, Tasnime Akunjee, who specialized in counterterrorism cases. Details piled up, and accusations flew. The UK authorities said they had sent an email to the Turkish authorities with the girls’ names. The Turks said the email had arrived blank. The families were beside themselves. Amira’s mother felt like her life had ended. Her mind did a continual sweep across the past several weeks; she castigated herself for missing clues. On February 22, Amira’s father, the man who had fled Ethiopia so his daughter could lead a more secure life in the West, went on television, clutching her teddy bear, imploring his fifteen-year-old daughter to reconsider. “We miss you. We cannot stop crying. Please think twice. Don’t go to Syria.” His English was halting and his voice soft.

  For many in Britain, the fact of the girls’ youth—that they were schoolchildren and minors, that they had been preyed upon by recruiters—was irrelevant. A right-wing commentator for The Sun newspaper blamed the parents of “The Syrian Three” for not preventing the girls from “[scurrying] off to be brides of jihad, sporting nothing more than a burka and industrial lubricant.” He demanded that the government drop its efforts to bring them back: “Given we know where The Syrian Three are, maybe we should leave them to get on with epilating their leg hair and pleasuring spawn of Satan, and focus on our own missing kids?” And so it was: voices in the media made the case that Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima were no longer our own kids; their Britishness evaporated, as though it had never existed in the first place.

  It was not only the right-wing press that blamed the girls and their parents; one columnist writing in the liberal newspaper The Independent mocked Amira’s father’s appearance on television:

  I wanted to ask Abase Hussen, as he clutched his daughter Amira’s stuffed toy, what exactly he thought was the tipping point that made his delicate, innocent baby-girl leave the country in such a rush that she left teddy behind? Was it the video of Alan Henning—a man who stood for nothing but kindness—having his head removed? Was it photos of crucifixions in central Raqqa? The reports from Kobani of raped, mutilated six-year-old female corpses lying in the streets? Which image of a future life excited her the most? Submissive jihadi bride with a big strong executioner boyfriend? Machine-gun-toting trained killer? And all this without her teddy bear?

  The writer concluded by addressing the girls directly:

  I’d go as far as to say you shouldn’t be allowed back into the country ever, when surely there are dozens of other bloodier, more depressing places that suit your lifestyle choice better. However, I’ve asked my liberal friends what we should do and they all wring their hands and say after some mumbling, “Nothing.” So give me a call when you’re bored with all the stoning, crucifying and beheading. I’ll meet you at Heathrow Arrivals with your teddy.

  Once the newspapers discovered that Amira’s father had attended political rallies in London—protesting the mass Saudi expulsion of Ethiopians, protesting against the American film mocking the Prophet Muhammad—they annulled his right to blame the police for any negligence. They said it was his fault that his daughter Amira had gone to “take up an exciting and challenging position as an in-house whore” for ISIS.

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  AMONG THE MUSLIM COMMUNITY, IN living rooms and dining rooms across London, the conviction grew that a failure of such massive proportions was simply inconceivable. The families were so distraught and furious with the police that Salman Farsi, the spokesman of the East London Mosque, started acting as intermediary, though he too was stunned by the lapses. “The conversations that were coming out, that were being repeated, was that they were allowed to go,” he said. “People thought, they said, they let them go because they wanted to make a point.” Or they let them go, perhaps, for the purpose of watching them and collecting intelligence, so they could better understand the chain of handling and command that scooped up girls from East London and deposited them into Raqqa. Or even, the family’s lawyer suggested, to boost the status of whatever mole the UK security services already had inside ISIS.

  If anything, Prevent, the government’s counterterrorism policy charged with identifying young people at risk of extremism, was primed to overreact. So how had it failed to mark the girls as being at risk? How had officers failed to act when Shamima contacted Umm Layth, a known ISIS recruiter? “This was all done under the watch of Prevent and it was a complete failure of Prevent,” said Farsi. “If the police were aware of this situation, if the school was aware, how were these schoolgirls then subsequently allowed to stroll out of Britain and travel to Turkey? How on earth did that happen?” The families began planning a trip to Turkey. Like many families in the same situation across Europe, they did not feel the police were interested in helping them get their girls back.

  The police confiscated the mobile phones of other girls at the school, girls who they knew were in contact with Kadiza, Shamima, and Amira after they left; they returned the phones, presumably bugged, to monitor their contact even more closely.

  Though much of serious academia rejects the notion of “radicalization”—there is no empirical basis for predicting when an individual will commit acts of violence—the approach generally followed by law enforcement, whatever its flaws, follows the “bunch of guys” theory: the idea that young people join radical groups through peer pressure and in clusters. The police started applying this thinking after the Bethnal Green girls had left. But, apparently, none of this had been applied to these girls before it was too late.

  When a parliamentary committee held a hearing to examine the failures—misstep after misstep, each lapse more implausible than the last—the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police said he was “sorry” the letters had never made it home, and the head of the committee said it was “a big blow to the credibility of what is supposed to be…the best police service in the world.” The girls had funded their journey with a sizable amount of cash and with considerable logistical support. “This was not a package holiday,” the families’ lawyer said. Who had helped them? Why was no one telling them anything? Jewelry, the police finally said. Everyone knew Asians kept gold jewelry in the house. The girls must have taken gold and sold it. The families were incensed by this suggestion. With the exception of one girl, who’d taken two gold bangles, the girls had left behind even their jewelry.

  Bethnal Green Academy hired expensive lawyers. The tabloid press sent reporters to loiter outside the school, bribing teenage girls for any tidbits about the three runaways. One newspaper sequestered one of the g
irls’ parents in a hotel, extracting an exclusivity agreement in exchange for a sizable sum of money. Suddenly the extended family around the girls, many of them on pinched incomes and living on council estates, realized that newspapers were willing to write hefty checks for anything they said. They obliged: It was the police’s fault! The school’s fault! The teachers’ fault! The mosque’s fault! Mr. Abase’s fault! Tabloid reporters assumed multiple identities, ran stories under fake bylines, pitted families and institutions against each other. The bribery and the payments corrupted the story, clouding a clear picture of which institution should be most accountable. And the girls remained lost.

  It took a fellow millennial, the mosque spokesman Farsi, to figure out how to reach them. He came up with a social media campaign, #callhomegirls, and launched it across Twitter in late March, just over a month after the girls disappeared. The next morning, Kadiza, the studious girl with the glasses and winsome smile, accepted her sister’s request to follow her on Instagram, and they began to private message. Kadiza asked after her mother. “She is on her prayer mat asking Allah to help her find you,” her sister wrote. Kadiza said she would call soon. She seemed suspicious of her sister’s efforts to find her. Her sister decided to test her, to make sure it was really Kadiza messaging. “Who is Big Toe?” Kadiza responded: “lol, our cousin.”

  When Kadiza got in touch again the next day, she said she was staying in a comfortable house, “with chandeliers.” When her sister asked if she was getting married, Kadiza chafed at the question. “You know me too well. I’m not here just to get married to someone.” But when pressed, she said she was “considering.” Her sister told her the police had promised the family that if the girls came home, they would not be prosecuted. She begged her to consider returning. Kadiza said flatly, “They’re lying.”

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  ACROSS BRITAIN, SCHOOLS WITH LARGE Muslim student bodies reeled. In East London alone, police confiscated the passports of around thirty schoolgirls believed to be at risk of traveling to Syria. Skittish teachers and administrators awaited instruction on how to respond. “We’re all bloody terrified it’ll be our school in the papers next,” one principal whispered to a journalist. Teachers in London received an open letter from a women’s-rights campaigner to read to their students.

  Dear Sister, You won’t know me but like you I too am British and Muslim. Some of your friends may have gone out to join ISIS and you are also considering going out too….I have no other intention of writing this letter but to tell you that you are being lied to in the wickedest of ways….Dear sister, do not destroy your life and your families lives by buying into a lie….You will find many of your fellow Muslim sisters have also rejected the call of ISIS as they have seen through the poisonous ideology it peddles.

  The letter detailed ISIS’s violence and rapaciousness, its corruption of core Islamic tenets. It was a moving and persuasive critique of ISIS and its messaging. The author was a British Muslim woman in her late thirties called Sara Khan, an activist who ran Inspire, an organization that worked on countering extremism from a women’s-rights perspective.

  By the mid-2010s, Khan had become one of the most vocal and visible Muslim women working on issues of extremism and women’s rights. She enjoyed easy access to prominent television and radio platforms, appeared in the pages of Vogue, and toured schools to share her lessons for keeping girls safe from the lure of extremism. She was unflinching in her criticism of patriarchal practices in Muslim communities and argued that religious ideology was the root cause of the appeal of ISIS and violent extremism. “I feel like Wahhabism and Salafism have stolen my faith away from me,” she said publicly, talking about her drive to “reclaim my faith from these fascists.” What young Muslims needed, she insisted, was to receive the right kind of messages, what Khan called “online counter-narrative products.” She proceeded to launch a #makingastand campaign against ISIS in The Sun, a tabloid newspaper that relished publishing lies about Muslims.

  This position made her an ideal voice and advocate for the British government, which by that time had moved to classifying extremism as an ideological condition, divorced from politics. Khan’s slow rise into the limelight coincided with the steady intensification of the state’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy. By the mid-2010s, British Muslims found themselves disproportionately incarcerated and targeted at airports and borders; they saw their strongly performing faith-based schools scrutinized and shut down for often minor or exaggerated lapses; and, most frighteningly, they found the state increasingly willing to take their children away, on grounds of safeguarding them against radicalization. These very real anxieties underpinned much of the concern about Prevent, but Khan accused what she called an “anti-Prevent lobby” pushed by “Islamists” of creating a “toxic” climate and narrative about the state’s strategy, a strategy she insisted was largely working and needed.

  Khan presented her group, Inspire, as a grassroots women’s group, but it emerged in 2016 that her #makingastand campaign had not only received government funding, but had also been crafted by a branch in the British government’s Home Office, the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). RICU produced what it called “strategic communications,” or, in Cold War parlance, propaganda, aiming “to effect behavioral and attitudinal change,” according to its own documents. When Khan released a book in 2016 called The Battle for British Islam, her coauthor was a consultant who worked for this same government unit.

  The term “the Muslim community” was problematic, Khan regularly pointed out, as it glossed over all the diversity, rifts, and contradictions among Britain’s almost three and a half million Muslims. But if this monolith called “the community” had one thing in common, it was resentment at being manipulated, increasingly treated by the state as a security threat and second-class citizens. It had become routine for the government to surveil Muslim Britons and interact with them through layers of subterfuge. Social workers later turned out to be counterterrorism officers. Teachers handed out surveys to kids in primary schools with large Muslim intakes, asking them questions about God and identity, in what later emerged to be a state effort to “identify the initial seeds of radicalization with children.”

  It was precisely such an atmosphere that made Muslims resent the rise of Khan. As the government steadily cut ties with a broad array of Muslim community groups, on grounds of their social or political views, it appeared to be willing to interact only with a specific current of civil society that it had largely funded and cultivated. What the state presented as engagement with Muslims was largely just a conversation with itself.

  Khan reacted defensively to the criticism about the lack of transparency about her ties to the government, portraying it as an attack on her gender-equity message by Islamist radicals. As early as 2014, a female Muslim blogger wrote that Khan had “really lost the plot, from a reasonably Islamically grounded Muslim to, well, a frankly confused stooge who has completely lost her way.” By late 2015, a popular Labour MP called Khan’s group “the most loathed organization among Muslim communities,” and in 2018, the former chairwoman of the Conservative Party called Khan a “Home Office mouthpiece.” The government nonetheless appointed her Commissioner for Countering Extremism, charged with, ironically, community engagement.

  In public discussions around ISIS and the girls’ disappearance, there was suddenly very little diversity or real exchange of views, and instead a desperate push to identify a single cause, a single story of culpability. The government blamed ideology. Think tanks refined that, and blamed Saudi-exported Salafism. The tabloids and right-wing figures blamed ordinary Muslims. It was like a Rorschach test: much of what people identified as important reflected more about their own tendencies, whom they wished to exculpate or blame. A British Muslim journalist on the terrorism beat spoke of “toxic activity” among Deobandis in Walthamstow. The former member of an extremist group, now working
for the government, had a psychosexual take, that girls were trying to “break away from the daily grind of their traditional roles in families that see them as objects.” Pro-Israel activists warned there was anti-Semitism at play. Muslim activists pointed to the War on Terror and harassment by the security services. White feminists blamed toxic masculinity and “intimate terrorism.” The mother of a young woman who left for Syria said small-town racism and her ex-husband were to blame: “He is a villain. Everyone in this town has heard of him, and no one has anything good to say.”

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  AT BETHNAL GREEN ACADEMY, IT soon became clear that the school’s official response to the girls’ disappearance would be a severely English silence. It would not be discussed that the authorities had confiscated the passports of several other girls from the school and made them wards of court, a designation that made the family court system their ultimate legal guardians, without whose permission they could not leave the country. Shortly after the girls’ disappearance in February, the head teacher called an assembly. Students and teachers were openly distraught, but he spoke about the girls’ departure in clipped terms that ended the discussion. Teachers were instructed not to talk about it, even off the record, long into the future.

  Was it upsetting, bewildering, and possibly traumatic to have four girls from your school—the smart, popular ones at that—disappear to ISIS? No longer sitting next to you in English class poring over Animal Farm, discussing why the pigs (the girls sometime spelled out P-I-G when speaking aloud, to minimize its haram grossness) embodied tyranny and propaganda. No longer kneeling next to you on Fridays in the prayer room, pressing their foreheads to the ground. Someone could have helped the students of Bethnal Green Academy to make some sense of it all, but making sense of it, as some students would discover later, was dangerously too close, in the eyes of the police and other community authorities, to sympathizing.