Isis wives on trial: Did they go willingly? What was their role? Will they finally face justice?

Many came with their husbands, others came in search of one... In a courtroom in Baghdad, Richard Hall watches the trials of four suspected Isis wives and is shocked by the sentences handed out

Wives on trial: each tells a unique story of how they ended up in the caliphate (Reuters)

The judge delivered his verdict with a softness rarely heard in a courtroom where terrorists are regularly sent to their deaths. The defendants, four women thousands of miles from home, stood in a wooden cage in the centre of a room in Baghdad’s central criminal court. The eldest of them stroked the hair of her infant daughter as she slept peacefully in her arms. A young boy pulled at the abaya of his mother, oblivious to the gravity of the moment.

The women were all from Kyrgyzstan, and had been arrested separately in Iraq on suspicion of being Isis members when the caliphate collapsed around them. Their trials had lasted for minutes, one after the other, and now they stood in the dock together to hear their fate. “These crimes are punishable by death, but the court is merciful,” the judge said. After a brief pause for his words to be translated, he announced that each of them would receive 15 years in prison. “This is the minimum sentence the law allows,” he added.

In the imagination of much of the world, the Isis caliphate was a warrior state of fighting men, local extremists joined by foreigners who came to kill and be killed for their idea of an Islamic utopia. But that is only half the story. Thousands of women came from abroad, too, after being equally as enthralled by the group’s promises and propaganda. Many came with their husbands, others came in search of one. They became known as “Isis wives”.