In my opinion, journalists should be people who have the ability to be both curious and cynical at the same time. They need to be intensely curious about the world but also cynical and questioning about the motives of the people they talk to. A person who is reporting the news should be the sort of individual who likes digging out information whether that be by talking directly to people outside of their social, national and class circles and also the sort of person who is happy rooting around in archives. They should also be extremely aware that there are people and groups out there that will hoodwink journalists for their own ends or befriend reporters in order to get their own propaganda in front of the eyes of the public. This is where the cynicism should come in and those working in news media should ideally think ‘why is this person telling me this’ and ‘what’s in it for them’?
One area where journalists have most certainly failed to either be curious or be sufficiently cynical is that of the jihadi brides of ISIS. Journalists have failed to take notice of what is going on in recent years with ISIS supporters and do not realise that although ISIS no longer holds any territory in Syria or Iraq, that does not mean that this group or its supporters have gone away. Journalists have also not been sufficiently cynical about groups that support these jihadi brides have been saying or where reporters have merely repeated without question the words of various NGO’s have been captured by a pro-jihadi bride narrative.
The Irish journalist Norma Costello is an exception to the rule about reporters being incurious and not cynical about ISIS. She has written a brilliant piece over at Unherd all about how journalists and NGO’s have been complicit in whitewashing the issue of jihadi brides who followed ISIS to Iraq and Syria.
Ms Costello has been following the ISIS story since 2014 and has even gone undercover in online ISIS forums in order to find out what this group and its supporters have been up to. What she has found is worrying both for what it tells us about what the remnant of ISIS is up to and also for what it says about the state of journalism today.
She said that there has been a consistent effort by the supporters of the jihadi brides to paint them as innocents who deserve to be brought out of the prison camps where they are currently held and back into their originating countries. There is as Ms Costello said a case for bringing jihadi brides back but only so they can be tried and hopefully convicted and punished for their choice to ally themselves with one of the most disgusting terror groups of recent years.
Ms Costello said:
Around the beginning of the pandemic, family and friends of Isis members began to gently craft a new narrative about their women. They had never supported the caliphate. They were innocents forced to travel there by men. They were, in their own way, victims. These grown women had been “trafficked” into Isis territory. Ignore the fact that many of them bought their own tickets.
This narrative was being peddled by a cluster of online groups, which had sympathetic names such as “Repatriate the Children”. The funding behind them is questionable: in Ukraine, where I am now, some organisations supporting Isis families were connected to Russia. Most claimed to be primarily concerned with the wellbeing of minors, many of whom had been born in Isis territory, were injured and, yes, should have been repatriated — albeit to countries many of them had never even visited. But soon the remit of these groups broadened. They began to speak of “women and children” in a Syrian “refugee camp”.
What appears to have happened, according to Ms Costello is that support groups for the jihadi brides managed to gain influence over some NGO’s working in the human rights area and then the pro-jihadi bride narrative which is that they are innocents who were ‘trafficked’ was then passed on to journalists. Whilst there is fault in the NGO’s in naively accepting the narrative of those who support the jihadi brides and who have painted them as ‘innocent women and children, fault also must be laid at the door of reporters. Journalists covering this phenomenon of groups whitewashing the activities of the jihadi brides should have been more cynical about what they were being told. Reporters may have trusted what are high status NGO’s much more than they should and have ended up repeating the false narrative that the jihadi brides were innocents who were misled.
This problem might have been avoided had journalists been more cynical and wary of what they were being told but the problem is too many reporters might have seen the NGO’s as ‘reliable’ and trustworthy sources and not considered whether or not these NGO’s who they were relying on were sound or whether they’d been compromised. When an NGO, even an ostensibly ‘respectable’ one, or a government or a company tells a reporter something the reporter should be thinking ‘why are they saying this’ and ‘is there more to what they are saying than at first might be apparent’? When it comes to a story like that of the jihadi brides an ISIS then journalists should have been much more wary than they seem to have been about what they were being told. The result of this, sadly, has been that a group of people, the jihadi brides, have ended up being able to whitewash themselves and their crimes, something that I believe should not have happened.
