The "ISIS" brides due to return today

"will face the full extent of the law" and "will be arrested" - well, some of them will. They will "all be subjected to monitoring" - perhaps.

I keep wondering about this. I suspect these "ISIS" brides, women who went off to join their husbands in the Islamic State fight which failed are not all the same. 

Some of them will have gone out of a belief that the proposed caliphate would come about. They would have seen themselves as the wives of the leaders. They would have been ready to assume roles which gave them control over other women. They would have believed they would eventually be leading lives where they controlled not just other Muslim women but all women. These women would be hard line radicals. I have no doubt that at least one of those returning to this country will be in that category. She will still be a believer in these things. Given the opportunity she would do it again and believe that doing it "differently" would mean success the next time.

Then there will be others who will still believe it was right to go. They won't see it as a failure but a setback. The conditions there may have been appalling but they will believe that this is necessary in order to get to heaven.

There will be others who believe varying shades of both these things.

And there will be women who went because they had no choice. They had married, often by family arrangement, the men they went to join. They were told that not to go would bring shame on their families and the families of the men who went. They will have been taken out of school at the earliest possible age. They are not well educated. All their lives they have lived under the control of their fathers, their brothers and their husbands. To a lesser extent they have also been controlled by their mothers and then their mothers-in-law. They will have submitted to sex whenever it was required of them. They will have had multiple children and be expected to bring them up in the same traditions. 

This group will go on believing all this is right because this is what they have always been told. Changing those beliefs will be impossible. They may appear to do so. They may try but those beliefs will always be there.

Monitoring all these women, their children and grandchildren will cost millions of dollars every year for many years to come. Those who are citizens of this country have the right of return. How we handle the situation is going to be a test for all of us.