THE RETURNING MEMBERS OF ISLAMIC STATE

The New York Times is reporting this morning that Turkey is holding 2,280 Islamic State members from 30 nations and that all of them will be deported. It's a good bet that there will be more than one or two Trinis in that group (as well as elsewhere) which means that they will be here sooner or later.


But here's the problem: regardless of what these people will say, what are the odds that they have been de-radicalized? Put another way, it is a fair bet that many of these Islamic State members (women as well as men) have received training in terrorist activities and (perhaps more importantly) how to conduct warfare ... especially guerilla warfare.


So? What's the problem, you ask? Well, we know that we have a great many guns ... a lot of real guns, such as AK 47's and semi automatic rifles coming into the country. And a lot means A LOT!!  We also know that we have a very serious gang problem with God knows how many gang members floating around with access to this heavy weaponry. So, if these ISIS members come back home to good old T&T with the specialized training that they have received what do you think the chances are that they will gravitate towards one or the other of these gangs and start to train them in the art of warfare? Such training is not exactly available right now to these gangs ... or at least, I don't think that it is. And when they (the gangs) receive such training what do you think will happen with our already out of control crime situation? And when the ISIS people  come back home how many do you think will or are going to fit right back into society as if they had never left and will get jobs and settle down quietly forever and ever, amen? (I agree with you: not a lot!)


What can be done? Well, the simplest answer is to strip anybody who has joined any terrorist organization of his/her TT citizenship and prevent him/her from ever returning home. But this approach has a large number of rather obvious legal as well as ethical problems and I'm not certain that this would be the right solution. Another approach might be to detain everybody and anybody who went away to join Islamic State and to subject them to what can be euphemistically referred to as "re-education." Again, this is not exactly a good solution and it raises some rather obvious legal and ethical problems.


It is a truism that there is always a solution to every problem. The trouble is that very often the solutions are worse than the problems themselves. Frankly, I really don't know what would be best for our society as regards these ISIS people and how we should handle them. But I do know that their return represents a real threat to our society and that one way or the other we are going to have to deal with it. It is better that  we start to discuss this problem now rather than wait until it is upon us.


For me, this is more important right now than a lot of the platform rhetoric that we are getting about 'who t'ief what' or 'who is de bigger t'ief'. Not that those questions aren't important, but the threat to the safety and security of our little republic is very real and is not something that most of us are bothering to think about.