Fifteen months have passed since 19-year-old Aqsa Mahmood left her Glasgow home to join Isis. Aqsa, who comes from a loving family and went to private school, left for university one morning in November, 2013. She travelled to Syria, claiming she wanted to help the Syrian people.

In February of last year, she married an Isis fighter and has since become a notorious poster girl for the extremist group; the "jihadi bride" who is alleged to have called on her Muslim brothers to follow the example of "Woolwich", a reference to the barbaric murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.
Since her departure, every day for the Mahmood family has been filled with horror. Many people have been quick to condemn the family but the Mahmoods, like others, will spend the rest of their lives full of guilt for having missed the signs of radicalisation.
Hindsight is a great thing, but Mrs Mahmood regrets that she ever listened to the police when they told her not to go after her daughter. For, despite informing the police that Aqsa may have left for Syria, the family were told on the first day that there was nothing they could do. It was only on the third day that counter-terrorism officers from Police Scotland attended their home, and by then it was too late.
The Mahmoods have described Aqsa as a "bedroom radical", but they don't know what turned their gentle and loving daughter into a hardened Isis member. She was given every
life chance, showered with love and affection
and enjoyed freedoms that other Asian girls would envy. Yet it has been claimed that
Aqsa radicalised and recruited one or more of the three teenage girls who are believed to have travelled from their homes in Bethnal Green, London, to Syria.
The Mahmoods have been uncompromising in condemning their daughter, warning other families to be vigilant. At every stage in the investigation, the family co-operated with the police. Last week the Metropolitan Police's Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, while giving evidence at the home affairs select committee, declared to the watching world that Aqsa would be prosecuted if she returned.
Her family are left to pick up the pieces. What more could have Aqsa's parents have done? Like many other Muslim households, the Mahmoods warned their children against extremist websites. But had they banned her from going out or using social media, they would have been accused of being far too conservative.
On a recent trip to Glasgow, Europol's director, Rob Wainwright, described current terrorist threat levels in Scotland as at their highest ever. "Stopping IS from spreading propaganda online is a priority but very difficult - the leaders of the Muslim communities need to step up," he said.
But many of those described as "community leaders" have little relevance to Muslims today. And while every atrocity is followed by public statements of sorrow from a queue of those so-called "Muslim leaders", we never elected them to speak on our behalf and we are sick of their useless apologies.
If we really want to move young Muslims from violence to non-violence, it will take much more than routine declarations that "Islam is a religion of peace". There needs to continuous, honest, open and robust discussions, which our "leaders" are entirely unsuited to conduct, let alone lead.
Following 9/11 Scotland's mosques were politically neutered: the need to get rid of radical preachers effectively led to the eradication of any political debate whatsoever.
Our community leaders are out of touch with the fact that a minority of our young people privately express admiration for Isis or anyone perceived as "giving the West a kicking". At first I assumed this was little more than adolescent posturing, but such support is clearly providing a steady stream of Isis recruits.
In 2006, when I defended Scotland's first so-called al-Qaeda terrorist (subsequently acquitted on a miscarriage of Justice appeal), much of the propaganda we looked at included videos of men with long beards ranting in Arabic in front of a black flag, followed by a truck blowing up as it drove towards the Americans.
It wasn't a particularly effective recruitment tool but, combined with external factors such as UK foreign policy, it found a pool of ready volunteers. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ordinary young man who became the 7/7 suicide bomber, wasn't a religious zealot, but he took extracts of Islam that suited the deadly message he wanted to deliver.
Today, Isis runs a powerful propaganda machine on social media to promote a violent interpretation of Islam, using methods that are much more attractive and accessible than al-Qaeda's. According to the US State Department, they tweet 90,000 times a day with popular hashtags to spread their message.
Isis is much more successful in their pitch to a younger generation than al-Qaeda were a decade ago, and they are specifically targeting young females. After all, becoming a Jihadi fighter/bride is much more appealing than becoming a suicide-bomber, however distorted that may be to us.
A decade ago, al-Qaeda would meet recruits face to face; today Isis uses Western recruits to engage in one-to-one dialogue across several thousand miles via Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp and Tumbler.
With an estimated $2 billion budget, they produce slick, high-quality videos, where sexy bearded jihadists are paraded in between explosions as potential husbands.
Meanwhile, high-value recruits like Aqsa Mahmood have been catapulted to global superstar status.
It doesn't matter that the Isis narrative of kalashnikov, excitement and a ticket to paradise is false, because Isis are winning the propaganda war, portraying themselves as engaged in a struggle of good versus evil. They remain unchallenged on double standards of foreign policy, Israel, rendition, torture, or Assad having the freedom to butcher 200,000 of his own people.
The mainstream society's inability to engage with the anger felt by the Muslim community provides ready-made cannon fodder for the hate-mongers. As a teenager during the 1980s, I expressed nihilistic desires to run off and join the PLO. Fortunately this was long before social media, mobile phones, or cheap flights. My parents hoped that I would shuffle off into mortgage slavery as soon as I left adolescence, but today there is no such guarantee.
The idea that stamping out radical sites will stop terrorism is simplistic. Last year the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence found "little evidence to support the contention that the internet plays a dominant role in the process of radicalisation" - and the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) Programme was viewed as an attempt to spy on communities, and failed abysmally.
As for women and radicalisation, the President of Glasgow Central Mosque told of his shock over Aqsa Mahmood and said that as far as he knew, she "had never been to the mosque".
But why would she? Mosques across Scotland have long excluded women. All the elders at Scotland's largest mosque (Glasgow Central) are male. They are experts in patronising anyone under the age of 45 whom they deem to be a threat to their status as "community leaders".
Many Muslims rightly argue that Islam liberated women 1400 years ago by granting them property rights and the right to divorce, but it is a pointless argument when women don't even have the right to vote in our mosques today, and are accorded second-class status.
Take a walk into Glasgow Central Mosque and the democratic deficit will be obvious. The management committee is made up of 20 or so men with an average age of 70, with women excluded from any meaningful role. When a few years ago young female students asked to become official members, they were turned away and tagged as the "Muslim Suffragettes". Little has changed.
In mosques throughout the country, young people regard the traditions practised by their elders as irrelevant, and while they treasure their mosques as places for worship, they despise the petty politics inside.
There have been attempts to provide an alternative focus outside the mosque, such as I-Syllabus, a ground-breaking course which teaches about Islam and addresses contemporary challenges such as jihad and discrimination, but lack of funding limits their useful role in preventing extremism.
Mosques are rife with stories of how young Muslims best placed to challenge radicalisation are sidelined or threatened if they dare complain about the status quo. Some have actually been reported by mosque leaders as extremists to counter-terror police. Police Scotland needs to take a long, hard look at its "community engagement" with such leaders.
Most of our mosques have little to offer intelligent, inquisitive youngsters besides recitals of Koranic verses. The repeated failure to debate current social and political issues means that mosques have created a vacuum outside their walls which are filled by extremists.
Many young Muslims are stuck in limbo, searching for an identity. Never mind not knowing their teenager is being groomed for Isis, most parents don't even know if their kids are down at the local shisha bar, or partaking in drink or sexual relationships. So of course when a teenager comes home saying he or she is becoming more religious, parents are relieved that they no longer have to worry about sex or drugs.
The recent flight of three teenage girls from London to Isis created panic in every Muslim family. The media screamed that 15-year-old Shamima was in direct contact with Aqsa Mahmood via Twitter, but Aqsa's social media content was being monitored by the security services so why didn't the police know Shamima could be on the cusp of radicalisation?
Despite the UK Government's loud rhetoric on community and parental responsibility, there are no resources devoted to teaching parents how to monitor social media, nor is there any de-radicalisation programme to assist those in real danger.
The real scandal, however, is the authorities' failure to deal with the grooming and trafficking of underage girls by Isis as a child protection issue. Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, revealed that the head teacher of the Bethnal Green school was told by the police not to reveal to other parents that a young girl had left for Syria in December.
Meanwhile, Aqsa's Mahmood's father, who has described his daughter's actions as a "twisted, perverted distorted interpretation of Islam", now wonders if she is a convenient scapegoat, while those who radicalised her are free to groom.
The grooming analogy is apposite: a paedophile makes contact with a child, builds trust and persuades her not to discuss anything with her parents. When the time is right he will convince the child to leave her family and join him. If subsequently it was discovered that the police had known all along yet did nothing to warn her family, there would be a public outcry.
Imagine if anyone suggested that a teenage victim of Jimmy Saville deserved her fate; yet a teenage girl brainwashed by Isis, then trafficked to be married off to an unknown Jihadist, has only herself to blame.
Following the 7/7 attack, Tony Blair made a point of insisting, contrary to intelligence briefings, that the attacks on London had nothing to do with the war in Iraq. According to him they were motivated by an "evil ideology", a "perversion of Islam that promoted absurd grievances". British Muslims were charged with rooting out this evil and mobilising "moderate" Muslim leaders for that task.
That task has been an abject failure. The Bethnal Green girls, like Aqsa, were seduced by a narrative. On arrival in Syria they will be accepted into the bosom of Isis, their passports burnt and any contact with their family broken down.
The purpose of any cult is to isolate, create dependency and brainwash, until the only family the individual cares about are the cult. The common theme has always been to offer a great cause, a sense of belonging followed by a messianic plan to fulfil.
Surely we have enough experience of past cults to prevent this particular death cult - Isis - from winning the hearts and minds of our children?
When looking for whom to blame, we have forgotten our recent history and the disastrous treatment of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, parts of which acted as recruitment sergeants for the IRA.
The so-called intelligence obtained from internment was often erroneous but the sense of burning injustice effectively consolidated support for armed struggle for more than four decades.
Injustice has always been a rallying point for extremists and today's new Irish could be described as Muslim. Exploiting the current situation to bring in tougher anti-terror laws has created a climate of fear for Muslims who feel they are portrayed as threatening a "civilised" way of life.
Such an atmosphere makes it less likely that minority communities will report their reasonable suspicions to the police, thus cutting off valuable sources of community intelligence.
Of course the Muslim community has a central role to play in eradicating the promotion of a twisted ideology, but that will only work if the rest of society honour their responsibilities.
Unless we settle these uncomfortable questions, then intelligent young people will continue to be sucked into the cesspit by Isis, and our children will end up as sacrificial lambs.
The distortions surrounding Bethnal Green are nothing new. Our security services are used to cover-ups, whether it be over weapons of mass destruction, the death of Jean Charles De Menezes, the Brazilian man shot dead by the London Metropolitan police at Stockwell tube station, or their role in torture and rendition. So why would anything be different now? As for Aqsa Mahmood, I have a message from your parents: "We are begging you to stop. If you ever loved us, come home."
Aamer Anwar is a criminal defence lawyer who has been instructed in some of Scotland's highest profile cases including the trial of Scotland's first Islamist terrorist case, the Ice Cream Wars appeal and the perjury trial of Tommy Sheridan. His campaign for justice for murdered waiter Surjit Chhokar led to two judicial inquiries. He has been instructed to pursue the Lockerbie Appeal.
www.glasgow-lawyer.com