Screenshot from 'ISIS: Women Uneviled' (Netflix)In the past years, women have become an ideal weapon for terrorist groups.
From Tashfeen Malik, who pledged allegiance to ISIS and stormed a holiday party in San Bernardino in 2015, to the hundreds of teenage girls who leave their Western homes to travel to Syria in support of the Islamic State, female terrorist power is growing.
As of last year, ISIS has recruited approximately 600 Western women. And according to TIME, the number of non-Western women is believed to be much higher. Around 700 women from Tunisia alone have reportedly traveled to Syria to join jihadist groups.
In order to try to understand this growing trend, Netflix’s new documentary titled “ISIS: Women Unveiled” takes audiences behind the scenes of extremist meetings led by women in east London.
During one of the gatherings that undercover reporter Aisha recorded, Umm L – who is revealed to be a mother-of-four named Rubana preaches, “It’s not the first time the alliance has been formed like they have now with this coalition against the Khilafah [Islamic State]. But Allah one by one he will destroy them.”
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Although the meetings contained the usual messages of hate and anti-West ideologies that people have learned to expect, Aisha’s recordings also revealed a horrifying number of impressionable young women who agree with these sentiments.
And while the documentary doesn’t necessarily explain why these women join extremist parties, it uncovers an even deeper problem – a blind spot that hides the terrifying relationship between women and terrorism.
“We struggle to think that a woman, because they bring life into this world, they could possibly commit terrorism or be supportive of terrorism,” Sara Khan from Inspire, a counter-extremism organization, explains in the documentary. “In certain families, it is absolutely the women who are holding the extreme views and who are promoting anti-Western narratives and are encouraging people to join ISIS.”
But how do they do it?
For starters, ISIS attracts these women by romanticizing the “good life.” These women are invited to take part in the creation of utopian politics. “Most of the girls are drawn by a combination of fantasy and the feeling that by joining ISIS, they will be empowered, have an exciting life and do something meaningful with their lives,” Mia Bloom, professor at the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts, tells ABC News.
While men are marketed the chance to prove their faith by joining the war, female-targeted propaganda promotes the idea of sisterhood, the opportunity to marry a jihadi fighter and the privilege of raising the next generation of militants. They are made to believe they are important.
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Humera Khan, executive director of Muflehun, an organization that specializes in counter terrorism, explains to Marie Claire that there are at least 40 media organizations that create video, audio and written materials to idealize a lifestyle with the Islamic State. For example, the group advertises photos of markets with vibrant fruits, fresh vegetables and laughing children in the hopes that women will think the ISIS caliphate is the perfect Islamic community.
“There’s a priority for the Islamic State to attract females because it offers stability,” Khan says. “If you want people to see you as a nation, a legitimate state, it’s important to attract females and have them start families.”
But while women have always been valuable assets to terrorist groups, ISIS is now pursuing a new strategy of recruiting teenage girls online. As Aisha shows in “ISIS: Women Unveiled,” coming into contact with ISIS recruiters is relatively easy because they aggressively monitor social media. All a teenage girl has to do is show interest in the jihadi group.
“The moment you indicate any sort of interest in ISIS or ask any questions about it on a social platform, you get 500 new followers on Twitter,” Mia Bloom, professor and author of “Bombshell: Women and Terrorism,” tells Marie Claire. “You get 500 friends on Facebook, you start getting emails and messages constantly – it’s a kind of love bombing.” Once this happens, you start to feel popular, important, significant.
“And it all wraps up in the same ideology they message over and over: ISIS can give you something emotionally and psychologically that you will not have unless you come to the Islamic State,” Bloom adds.
Also, because many of these female recruiters engage in social media language, the emojis, memes and Internet shorthand help relay ISIS-approved message in more accessible language. “It helps with relating, finding common ground,” Bloom says. “It makes it feel more like the recruiter is just like you, a friend.”
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However, what many of these women don’t realize until after they’ve joined is that life in the caliphate isn’t as glamorous as they had imagined. According to Marilyn Nevalainen, a Swedish teenager who escaped ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq, life in the Islamic State was worse than she had anticipated. At just 16 years old, she ended up near Mosul, Iraq, with a new baby and a boyfriend who later died on an Iraqi battlefield.
“In the house we didn’t have anything – no electricity, no water – and it was totally different from our life in Sweden,” Nevalainen told The New York Times.
When women join ISIS, they don’t end up playing an active role and are not on the front lines. They get married right away, have children and stay at home. “The free will with which Western women join ISIS is stripped away the moment they sign up,” Kate Storey from Marie Claire writes.
And if they want out, these women have to rely on a smuggler to get them out, someone “you can trust,” says Anne Speckhard, author of “Brides of ISIS: The Internet Seduction of Western Females into ISIS. “If you’re a woman, he’ll probably rape you or the smuggler will say, ‘I’ll help you if you have sex with me.'”
But as gruesome as these conditions sound, author and human rights activist Rafia Zakaria points out that “both the appeal and the inner conflicts of ISIS exist not just in opposition to the West but in dialogue with it.”
Take France, for example. The country is a Western nation that supplies the largest number of ISIS female recruits. French Muslim schoolgirls, as Rafia Zakaria explains, are often excluded from school for wearing headscarves. For these women, ISIS seems like an escape from a nation that requires her to denounce her religion. “From this perspective, the ISIS denunciation of national identity in favor of a faith-based identity transcends borders in a crudely welcoming way,” Zakaria says.
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To serve as another example, sometimes groups like ISIS offer a certain kind of relief from cultural mores. Typically, a divorced or widowed woman with children rarely remarries in Afghanistan or Pakistan because a virgin bride is the only kind accepted. But, within jihadi communities, the prohibition doesn’t apply. Widowed women are immediately remarried. “A devout woman, despite her lost virginity, is still considered pure and marriageable because she wants to fight,” Zakira adds.
Thus, there are various motivations to consider when trying to understand why women become jihadists. To these women, joining the Islamic State, though it may not seem like “freedom” from a Western standpoint, seems like a legitimate response to victimization by their home countries and cultures. There is a complex interplay between culture, religion and politics that various scholars, political analysts and human rights activists are still trying to understand.
Regardless of the reason these women are joining, counter-terrorism expert Hannah Stuart’s analysis on “ISIS: Women Unveiled” about utilizing women’s power rings true. “We’ve been very slow to harness the power of women in terms of countering radicalization,” Stuart says. “Whereas, actually, extremist organizations, jihadist groups have long recognized the power of women.”
