The three young girls who have purportedly fled to Syria

Just back to the comparisons between these girls and those in Rochdale.

Not all the Rochdale victims were particularly vulnerable i.e. in care, abusive/neglectful parents, addicts, absent fathers, etc.

Over the last couple of years I've heard interviews on programmes such as Woman's Hour, wherein loving parents have talked about how devastated they are that their daughters were involved in such grooming and abuse, and how guilty they felt that they couldn't control the situation.

Normal, everyday working people whose daughters have, for whatever reason, been led astray.

Not all errant kids have bad parents.

"do I have to spell it out" ? How very rude and patronising. JessM
We are each entitled to our own opinion.

I think it a touch naive of you actually to think that because they are 15-16 they are walking blindly into this. No parallel/comparison between boys signing up to fight for their country in WW1. I am suprised how you can even suggest a comparison. Those young men did not see with their own eyes what they were going to. They were going to fight for the freedom of their own country. There were no videos showing them that the people they would be joining were evil, murdering, monsters.

I don't know them personally soontobe therefore my comments are not "sure" I am merely giving my opinion of three 15-16 year old Muslim girls who have left Britain for Syria in order to join ISIS. These are not three young girls who have left Britain to backpack around Thailand!

All that said. I do hope I am proved wrong.

They may well know more than we think they do, but gillybob, you are coming out with very sure statements. Which you cant possibly back up.

Gillybob do I have to spell it out:
They are naive young girls who are not yet mature enough to make sensible judgements, and they have been groomed/brainwashed.

I would draw the parallel with the many under age boys who signed up in WW1, victims of propaganda just like these girls.

I agree with Eloethan.

gillybob - "they are fully aware of what they are doing".
I dont see how you can possibly say that. Even if you were their auntie.

Anything is possible Eloethan but I think its highly unlikely that three young women who obviously take a keen interest in ISIS, hate preachers etc. really believe that they are all nice, decent human beings who are merely misunderstood. What would they think the vile videos were? Cartoons? Stage plays?

When it comes to talking about the voting age, a lot of people (myself included) feel that 16 is too young to have a reasonable grasp of what the various parties stand for and what their ultimate goals are (I know, there are probably plenty of people over the age of 16 to whom politics is a bit of a mystery but there has to be a "cut-off" somewhere).

Yet, some feel that these girls are intellectually and emotionally mature enough to be able to analyse the information which is being fed to them by those supporting ISIS and to be able to make major decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. To join the British Army a person has to be 17 years of age, with parental consent, and 18, without it (and personally I think that's still not old enough).

As to the feelings of revulsion that young British women could possibly support a murderous army of killers who commit terrible atrocities against innocent people, is it possible that these girls have been told these stories are untrue -that they are merely propaganda?

That's what I think too, rosequartz.

IS would have financed it in all probability. They are very wealthy.

Stansgran I've visited Turkey many times - currently EU citizens can obtain a tourist visa on arrival at the airport for £20.

I said in an earlier post that it took us a lot of effort to fill in a visa on line for Turkey this week. It costs and so does the flight out. You need a credit card. Do parents now let their children have open credit card allowances? I am very careful with money and in particular on line transactions and I'm baffled as to how these girls financed their trip. I don't think they are victims I think they are seriously at fault

Our next door neighbours 30 years ago were Muslim and totally unlike the family you describe, 'margaretx'
Lovely people, lively daughters and we are still in touch with them today even though now we live miles apart.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

These girls are (by definition) children grannactivist but I'm sorry they are certainly not like any "children" I know or have ever known. They are fully aware of what they are doing and I do not see them as victims at all. Firstly at least one of them was known to be following a Glasgow woman on twitter who left to marry a member of ISIS in 2013, she also followed hate preacher Anjem Choudhary. Doesn't sound very childlike to me.
Secondly where did they get the money from to buy airline tickets? who paid for them? . Who booked them? One of their fathers has admitted to knowing his daughter "has very strong feelings". Also which mosque did they attend?
What if these three "innocent" young women were three bearded young Muslim men?

JessM There is no comparison at all between three potentially very dangerous young women going to Syria of their own free will and extremely vulnerable young girls being sexually exploited.

I recognise the type of family that Margaretx talks of. My D lives next door to a Muslim family. Up until the girl was 12 years old she would play in the garden with my DGD. Then out of nowhere she never came into her garden or my Ds. She just goes to school and comes home. Her 2 brothers still play out, though.

Absent - yes I thought of that after I d posted and wondered about it. There were about 4000 on the republican side from the UK and I believe very very few on Franco's. Regardless of atrocities, the republican side was pro- democracy and so shared our basic values - they couldn't have been a danger to British society when they returned ( except of course some of them were left wing!). However those who supported Franco were a threat - anti democratic fascists and in fact were a danger to our society when they returned as they supported Hitler who did want to take over the world.

My thoughts are that the child sex abuse cases are somewhat different in that these girls were known to be vulnerable and that was exploited by paedophiles.
The girls who have headed for Syria are, so far as I can tell, from secure family settings, well educated and must surely have been aware of the atrocities played out by ISIS, even to the fact that the school had procedures in place including education about jihadists/extremists and their being questioned at school (doesn't that mean that the school had warning bells going off?) and one had been following umpteen jihadist sites for at least a couple of months.
What concerns me is how many of the 11,000 Twitter followers are considering, or actively seeking, to emulate these girls even if they all started 'following' after this hit the headlines.
ISIS must be keen to exploit all the publicity surely? Sickening thought.....

And gillybob what is your view on the child victims of sex-abuse rings in Rochdale etc?

Thanks for the link anno.
gilly do you at least see these girls as children?

Isn't it possible that those 11,000 only became Twitter followers of one of the girls after her name had appeared in the newspapers?

Thank you for the link Anno.

We dont know enough about them.

As loopylou said earlier one of them apparently has 11,000 twitter followers (idiots) and has clearly demonstrated her intentions whilst "following" sites of jihadi fighters etc.

So I'm sorry I really can't see these three as vulnerable children.

This article takes a more generous view of these girls than some of the posters on this thread. Her final paragraph is a reminder of how two-faced the press can be.

Makes you wonder doesn't it Eloethan why so many children of Muslim immigrants are making it to university these days to become doctors, pharmacists, lawyers etc. when they are not being looked after properly at home