'They deserve no mercy': Iraq deals briskly with accused 'women of Isis'

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

'They deserve no mercy': Iraq deals briskly with accused 'women of Isis'

A Baghdad court has sentenced more than 40 foreign women to death after 10-minute hearings

Martin Chulov in Baghdad and Nadia al-Faour
Tue 22 May 2018 05.00 BST

-snip-

All the 15 women in court last week had been widowed by the war that eventually ousted Isis from much of Iraq, killing tens of thousands of its members and replacing its promises of an Islamic utopia with a crushing defeat. The women here had in some cases willingly joined the group, travelling alone from Europe and central Asia, or with their partners, to what they believed to be a promised land.

More than 40,000 foreigners from 110 countries are estimated to have travelled to Iraq and Syria to join the jihadist group. Of those, around 1,900 are believed to have been French citizens, and around 800 were British.

Boutoutao arrived in Iraq in 2014, with her husband, Mohammed Nassereddine and two children. He was killed in Mosul in 2016 as was her son, Abdullah, one year later. She was captured by the Kurdish peshmerga in northern Iraq and eventually sent to Baghdad, where the fortified court in the centre of the capital has become a focal point of the post-Isis era.

Up to 1,000 women accused of belonging to Isis were rounded up from the ruins of Iraq’s towns and cities and are now being held in Baghdad to face a reckoning from a society and government that remains deeply scarred by the past four years, with much of their anger directed at foreign fighters and their families. Up to 820 infants accompany the women, with some others yet to be born.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/22/they-deserve-no-mercy-iraq-deals-briskly-with-accused-women-of-isis

[DetlefK]

1. The sad part is: Iraq has no choice to act otherwise.

As the article said: It's not just a question of punishing those who helped ISIS and might be a future threat.

Iraq has suffered through 15 years of invasion by the US, sectarian civil-war, and then a second invasion from the foreign extremists of ISIS.
Two invasions.
Iraq wants a clean cut. And fast. They faster they can stop thinking about ISIS, the faster their souls will heal.

Unfortunately, such a pressing political imperative leaves no room for impartial justice.