Fighting ISIS is a nightmare. Though forces on the ground in Syria and Iraq are petering out, and government forces have reclaimed Mosul, a key battleground, those allied to ISIS, or those who say they’re part of ISIS’s plan, keep popping up across the world. In Western Europe, we’ve seen terror attacks in London, Barcelona, Manchester, Marseille, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, and whether or not ISIS had a hand in them is by the by - ISIS nearly always claims credit for them, or the attackers have ties to extremist Islamism.
Though work has been done - and more needs to be done - on community outreach, on figuring out why (mostly) young disenfranchised men are seeking to hurt dozes, or hundreds’ of other lives, the leader of Chechnya has come to his own conclusions.
Fuzzy-faced Instagram star and kickboxing enthusiast Ramzan Kadyrov says that divorce will lead to ISIS gaining more recruits. His theory goes that separation causes social issues (rather than social issues causing separation), and that children raised by married parents would be less susceptible to extremism.
According to state TV, 948 couples had been reunited, thanks to a programme of ‘family reconciliation’. And Latvian news site Meduza reports Kadyrov as saying: We’ve got to wake people up, talk to them, and explain. We’ve got to return the women who left their husbands, and reconcile them. This is a priority.’
Chechnya is technically part of Russia, not Gilead, but it’s become much more authoritarian in recent years. The reunion process involves inviting divorced couples into a state department separately, where a mullah encourages them to get back with their ex. There is a state-funded hotline people can call so they can grass up any divorcees!
Rustam Abazov, director of the Republic’s Department for Relations with Religious and Social Organisations, told *Grozny TV, *reports* Newsweek*: ‘The programme was developed so clearly by Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov that absolutely no problems occurred in its implementation. I would like to emphasise that no country in the world has ever had such a programme.
‘This is something new in history. It’s the only time that people have responded on such a mass scale to the calls of the region’s leader.’
We’d make a joke about Abazov maybe needing to just marry Kadyrov already if he loves him so much, but Kadyrov’s the same guy who allegedly sent hundreds of gay men to concentration camps.
Additionally, as for men who’ve divorced and then gone on to remarry, they’re allowed to have more than one wife. Lucky them! Rasul Uspanov, who heads up the Chechen ‘headquarters for harmonising marital and family relations’, told the BBC about a man who: ‘After our commission's work…got his first wife back, and now lives with two wives, because under Islam a man can have four wives.’
People are understandably unhappy. A woman called Bariyat said: ‘It’s violence against people. If a couple got divorced, most likely it was a definite decision.’
What next? State-sanctioned propaganda of pictures of Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, as bastions of post-split reunion? Forced fertility tests to keep the land populated by proud healthy Chechens? How's about sensitive outreach work to help men address toxic masculinity inside themselves and seek unity outside of terror cells and heroes other than suicide bombers?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.