London // The response of the British police and government to the radicalisation of Muslims has been called into question after a large family group – three sisters and their nine children – left the UK and apparently joined ISIL in Syria.
Lawyers acting for the husbands of two of the women claimed antiterrorism police bore some responsibility for the family’s disappearance after “actively promoting and encouraging” contact between them and a brother already fighting with the extremists.
In letters to senior politicians, the lawyers said the actions of officers from the North East Counter-Terrorism Unit (Nectu) showed “a reckless disregard as to the consequences of any such contact on the families”.
Khadija, Sugra and Zohra Dawood, from the northern English city of Bradford, crossed into Syria with their children, aged from 3 to 15, last week, according to a BBC report quoting a man described as an ISIL smuggler.
A neighbour speaking anonymously to Time magazine said Zohra, 33, the mother of two girls, had told her Britain was “changing too much, and that she was going to take her daughters away because she didn’t see their future here anymore”.
The group left at the end of May for a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia but then flew to Turkey instead of returning to the UK as expected on June 11.
Ahmed Dawood, the women’s 21-year-old brother, has reportedly been fighting with ISIL for more than a year. Another neighbour said his departure had a profound effect on Zohra.
In letters to Keith Vaz, chairman of the UK parliament’s home affairs select committee, and to the foreign and interior ministers, the husbands’ lawyers said Nectu had plainly “been complicit in the grooming and radicalising of the women”. Had contact with Ahmed been prevented, “our clients would not now be facing such circumstances”.
The letter, sent on behalf of Mohammed Shoaib and Akhtar Iqbal, married respectively to Khadija, 30, and Sugra, 34, said “the actions and misjudgement of Nectu have placed the lives of 12 British citizens at risk”. Zohra’s husband, Zubair Ahmed, returned to his native Pakistan some months ago after the marriage collapsed.
The lawyers also said a voicemail message from Zohra Dawood to her family on June 17 confirmed she was in Syria and that she and her sisters had left because of “the oppressive nature of the continued surveillance by the police”.
The complaints have been rejected by police and also Mr Cameron’s office, which said “pointing the finger at the authorities or agencies ignores the real causes of radicalisation”. Russ Foster, assistant chief constable of West Yorkshire police, flatly denied police “were complicit in the alleged grooming of the missing family or that we were oppressive to them”.
The prime minister had already been criticised by some Muslim leaders, politicians and commentators for a speech in which he warned that those who “quietly condone” extremism contributed to radicalisation.
Speaking at a security conference in Slovakia last week, he condemned “Islamist extremist ideology that says the West is bad, democracy is wrong, women are inferior, homosexuality is evil”.
Mr Cameron asked how some people reached the view that “religious doctrine trumps the rule of law and Caliphate trumps nation state and it justifies violence in asserting itself and achieving its aims”. One factor, he said, was the approach of those Muslims who “don’t go as far as advocating violence, but who do buy into some of these prejudices”.
Alyas Karmani, co-director of Street, an anti-radicalisation group based partly in Bradford, told The National Mr Cameron had resorted to “the same convenient old story”.
In a society where Islamophobia was already a factor in turning some towards terrorism, he said, “conflating conservative Islam with extremism” was counterproductive, fuelling social exclusion.
Mr Karmani said the case of the Bradford 12 still caused anger and distress, despite the similar departures of thousands of western Muslims.
“It is shocking because of the children,” he said. “There is no Islam doctrine that would condone taking your children into an active war zone. It shows the depravity of this group [ISIL] that it is prepared to put the lives of women and children in such danger.”
Mr Karmani said he had been aware of the Dawoods before recent events, though he had no dealings with them. “They are just a few streets away from me,” he said. “The sisters’ father is a very elderly Islamic scholar, well respected, conservative and austere.”
Yasmin Qureshi, a Pakistan-born Labour opposition MP, also deplored Mr Cameron’s remarks, saying Muslims were tired of constantly being urged to apologise for what extremists did.
“I speak to my constituents who are very religious and whenever an incident happens they are shaking their heads in disgust and they’re actually saying, ‘our religion is being maligned’,” she told the BBC.
“In Charleston you had a white man who went and killed nine black people in a church. I don’t hear anybody saying that the whole of the white population has to apologise for the action of one white man.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
