Simon Cottee

This keeps me up at night. Have you come across this expression of pained anguish lately? This isn't about conversations with friends or loved one’s on Covid, returning to work or never working again. I’m talking about news stories on national security and terrorism, where experts and counter-terrorism officials are interviewed and feel duty-bound to disclose that they can't sleep at night. The number of these individuals who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep of late is frankly quite alarming. 'This keeps me up at night,' terrorism scholar John Horgan told Slate’s Aymann Ismail last November. He was referring to the gathering storm of far-right extremism in America.

Tooba Gondal, the so-called Isis “matchmaker” who acted as a megaphone and recruiter for the terror group, is reportedly on her way to France, as part of an initiative by Turkey to deport foreign jihadists in its jails. Gondal, who holds a French passport but spent most of her life in Britain, travelled to Syria in early 2015, where she married three times, gave birth to two children, became mates with ex-punk rocker Sally Jones, posed with an AK47 on social media, boasted about her firearm training, and hung on to the bitter end in Baghouz, from which she miraculously escaped just before it fell to Kurdish forces in March. She was subsequently captured by the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) and ended up at the Ain Issa camp in northern Syria.

Tooba Gondal, a notorious female Isis recruiter from Britain, was until Sunday a captive in the Ain Issa camp in north-eastern Syria. Now that the camp has fallen amid the chaos that is unfolding in the region, she is free again, as are hundreds of the other foreign denizens of the camp she was housed with. Her whereabouts are currently unknown. In April the Rojava Information Center in Syria published an interview with Tooba Gondal in which she expressed her desire to return to the UK with her children. It is possible that this is now where she is headed. Gondal, 25, is wily, resourceful and tough – and probably in possession of a mobile phone. So who knows where she will end up?

It has suddenly become very difficult to have a conversation about terrorism that isn’t overtly politicised or faintly hysterical. This is because so much of the discussion is dominated by what the late American philosopher Robert Nozick scornfully described as 'normative sociology' - the 'study of what the causes of problems ought to be'. 'If X is bad', Nozick wrote, 'and Y, which also is bad, can be tied to X via a plausible story it is very hard to resist the conclusion that one causes the other.' Because terrorism is obviously very bad indeed, it is acutely susceptible to being co-opted by cynical observers as a logical outcome of everything they love to hate.