Professor Michele Grossman

We know that a fairly large number of people, men and women and children, departed for Syria to join the Islamic State Caliphate.

2014, 2015, 2016, those were really the sort of peak years.

We talk about women who joined Islamic State as if they're all a single cohort, but actually they're not.

So some women went because they were absolutely ideologically aligned with what Islamic State stood for and what it was trying to do, particularly in terms of establishing the kind of caliphate that they wanted.

Some women went because they needed to keep their families together.

They might not have made the choice themselves, but if their husbands or partners made the choice

They went along.

In some cases, I think they did not want to lose their children.

The children would have been taken by the husband.

So you have a variety of different reasons.

Having said that, the chief reason was because people did want to align themselves with Islamic State.

And now, of course, because of the passage of time, you know, we're talking 10 to 12 years later than the peak period of travel.

There are now children who were born either in Islamic State-controlled territories or indeed born in the camps.

Yeah, so I think in terms of what they've been exposed to, certainly Islamic State represented not just a kind of military operation, if you like, to try to take control of territory in Syria and Iraq, but it represented a political operation.

and religious and cultural project.

That's how I would describe Islamic State.

And so people who were there, and particularly children, would have experienced a lot of indoctrination, a lot of training, a lot of socializing into the beliefs and the values and the behaviors and the norms of what Islamic State stood for.

And then, of course, what did Islamic State stand for?

It stood for a caliphate.

It stood for a very...