It’s unfair for Britain to take Tooba Gondal and other Isis brides back

I am sure that Tooba Gondal, the latest Isis bride to beg for a return to Britain, would, as she says, rather face justice in a British court than in the detention camp where she is being held in a Kurdish-controlled part of Syria. Maybe she really is the “changed person” she claims to be and she really would, if given the chance, do her best to “help prevent vulnerable Muslims from being targeted and radicalised” – as she wrote in her letter to the Sunday Times yesterday.    

But whether you believe her or not – and I have to say I read her pleas with a huge dollop of scepticism – it seems to me that the debate over what to do with Britons who willingly travelled to join Isis, either as fighters, brides or whatever, revolves around a somewhat questionable premise: that Britain has the right simply to take these people back and do with them what we want.