Conclusions

Delegitimize, Deglamorize, and Demobilize

We are faced with a complex problem and no easy solutions. Leaving the ISIS-affiliated women in refugee camps is politically fraught and physically dangerous, as the inhabitants of the camp “grapple with numerous challenges, including limited access to water, inadequate sanitation facilities, and a health care system inhibited by restrictive security practices.”¹

Leaving the women to rot in these detention centers undermines any possibility for their long-term reintegration into society. This sentiment is echoed by the Human Rights Watch director of crisis and conflict Letta Tayler: “Governments should be doing what they can to protect their citizens, not abandon them to disease and death in a foreign desert.”² The camps are indistinguishable from outdoor prisons, and hundreds of residents have been killed by other inmates.³ Human rights organizations are appalled at the unhygienic conditions, which include “overflowing latrines, sewage trickling into tattered tents, and residents drinking wash water from tanks containing worms. Young children with skin rashes, emaciated limbs, and swollen bellies [sift] through mounds of stinking garbage under a scorching sun or lay limp on tent floors, their bodies dusted with dirt and flies. Children are dying from acute diarrhea and flu-like infections.”⁴

Not all the women in al-Hol or al-Roj committed crimes, but not all the women were victims, either.

The range of women’s roles and activities in the global jihad are broad. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 2396 (2017) stressed that women who were affiliated with jihadi groups like ISIS, al Nusra, or even Boko Haram “may have served in many different roles, including as supporters, facilitators, or perpetrators of terrorist acts.” The UN urged its member states to pay special attention to this as women “require special focus when developing tailored prosecution, rehabilitation and reintegration strategies.”⁵ Yet, even though women have been involved in jihadi terrorism for over two decades, including suicide bombings in Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan, and despite increasing interest from counterterrorism and security services, we have few solutions from which to choose. Part of the problem for scholars and policymakers alike is that “there is still a considerable lack of data-driven, empirical research on female violent extremist offenders.”⁶ The literature remains saturated with anecdotes masquerading as data or continues to push insincere narratives about women’s agency.

Viewing women involved in jihadi terrorism exclusively as victims betrays an underlying preconception that men are always responsible for women’s actions who may be unwilling participants or victims. This bias misinterprets the spectrum of roles that women play in terrorist organizations. The most recent data suggests that women comprised around 20 percent of ISIS’s foreign fighters. For example, they were 20 percent of the 430 Belgian foreign fighters but 25 percent of France’s foreign fighters.⁷ Accordingly, women take on diverse roles in violent extremism, acting as “sympathizers, mobilizers, propagandists, recruiters, facilitators, planners, plotters, attackers, enablers or perpetrators.”⁸ The breadth and diversity of ways in which women participate in violent extremism demonstrates how crucial it is to consider and analyze their agency before they can be treated, tried, and hopefully rehabilitated.

Despite facing mounting losses and a last stand at Baghouz, ISIS refused to do what Al Qaeda in Iraq did a decade earlier: deploy the women as suicide bombers. There is still no clear explanation for this choice. Most terrorist groups facing odds like this would certainly have exercised an eleventh-hour “Hail Mary.” It seems, however, that ISIS assumed it was better to preserve the women (and most of the children) to live and to fight the enemy in the future. Al Qaeda’s Al-Shamika magazine had addressed the significance of women in its preamble back in 2011. One can infer that ISIS’s dream to survive to fight another day deferred their decision to dispatch the women to certain death. The magazine declared:

Because women constitute half of the population—and one might even say that they are the population since they give birth to the next generation—the enemies of Islam are bent on preventing the Muslim woman from knowing the truth about her religion and her role, since they know all too well what would happen if women entered the field of jihad… . The nation of Islam needs women who know the truth about their religion and about the battle and its dimensions and know what is expected of them.⁹

Part of the foundational error in exploring women in jihad has been the presumption that women in veils are powerless and docile. ISIS’s Arabic rulings (fatwas) specified rules for women that were uncompromisingly strict—women were not permitted to fight, nor could they engage with the enemy—much to the chagrin of some of the foreign-born women who had emigrated to the caliphate on the assumption that they would fight alongside the men. Based on their social media posts, the Western émigré women to ISIS like Aqsa Mahmoud (aka Umm Layth), Sally Jones, and Lisa Smith certainly expected to see some action. In preparation for her departure for Syria, Shannon Maureen Conley, a nurse from Colorado, went to train with the US Army Explorers, a cadet program to prepare for an anticipated combat role. Some of the foreign-born women, as this book has shown, literally begged to be deployed in qitāl (fighting) but were repeatedly refused.¹⁰

It was never assured that ISIS would spare the mujahidats from front-line engagement or from dying a martyr’s death. So much of the propaganda the group disseminated during its heyday gave women the false impression that they would eventually participate in some degree of combat. The foreign women occasionally expressed their dissatisfaction with the support nature of their roles. Women in ISIS played pivotal roles as teachers, nurses, doctors, and so on, crucial in the hyper-segregated caliphate. But the images that the terrorists had plastered all over their social media more than likely sowed confusion about the precise nature of women’s involvement once they arrived. There were discussions among certain religious Salafi sources of authority and ISIS leaders debating whether women could fight or not. The questions often remained unanswered, as there are only a narrowly defined set of circumstances in which a woman is permitted to engage in the lesser jihad. This was the case even though ISIS had released images and videos on social media in 2015 and 2016 showing the “sisters” holding Kalashnikov rifles and practicing their shooting. Over the almost five-year period of active ISIS propaganda, scores of images of heavily armed veiled women draped across Toyota trucks circulated on the ISIS semi-encrypted channels on Telegram.¹¹ This may explain why some foreign-born women who left their countries to join ISIS expected to be on the front lines. Whatever the reason, there was a backlash even from members like Aqsa Mahmood, who had to immediately change her attitude about the rationale for ISIS women and start extolling the virtues of marriage and motherhood.¹² Similarly other female foreign recruits took to social media to express their frustration.¹³

Reports from al-Hol and al-Roj suggest that the women’s extremism is alive, well, and percolating. In the minds of policymakers, then, there is always the fear that if repatriated, the women will radicalize others.¹⁴ Analysts debate whether there will be an ISIS 2.0 the way we have seen the Taliban take over Afghanistan after two decades out of power. There is always the threat of reemergence of the jihadis, or a new version materializing that is worse than its predecessor.

In 2024, a possible reemergence of ISIS in Syria foreshadowed the potential threats, not just from women but from the next generation being groomed for a future caliphate. This is yet another reason not to leave the women and children in the camps. Repatriation of foreign nationals remains a sticking point for European leaders, as this book has explained. Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have devised counterterrorism measures to hinder the return of foreign fighters from conflict zones.¹⁵ There is some prudence to their reticence. In France, the 2015 attacks against the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper and at the Bataclan music hall conjure the fear of a potential fifth column of citizens more loyal to a foreign ideology than the French ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Foiled or preempted attacks by female jihadis and converts—like the September 4, 2016, Notre-Dame plot, where Inès Madani, Ornella Gilligmann, Sarah Hervouët, Amel Sakaou, and Samia Chalel attempted to detonate glass cannisters filled with diesel using a lit cigarette near the Paris cathedral—evokes fear and distrust of women years later.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the European Court of Human Rights has demanded the repatriation of European citizens.¹⁷ Overwhelmed, the Kurdish Autonomous Administration does not want the responsibility of taking care of them indefinitely and has repeatedly called on home countries to take back all the foreigners in their custody.¹⁸ The willingness of states to repatriate ISIS-affiliated women and children has depended on the potential political costs. For some European leaders, allowing the women to return would be political suicide. Others might wait until they have won another term before shifting policies. For example, after Emmanuel Macron was reelected in April 2022, he abandoned France’s previous piecemeal approach and consented to a wave of repatriation.¹⁹ Between 2019 and 2023, around 400 children and 136 women were repatriated by European governments, although more European women and children remain.²⁰

While at this writing ISIS persists in organizing scattered terrorist attacks, jailbreaks, and other acts of violence, its operations can no longer count on a territorial outpost. ISIS affiliates in Africa and South Asia (such as ISIS-K) continue to carry out mass casualty attacks in Afghanistan, Russia, and Tajikistan, but what is left of the so-called caliphate is in disarray.²¹ The spike during the COVID-19 pandemic in ISIS attacks “raised new fears about the revival of the group” and appeared to give “early signs of an ISIS recovery.” According to security assessments, the uptick in attacks correlated with the weakening of sustained military pressure against the group in Iraq. In Syria, ISIS has benefited from the chaos that followed Turkey’s October 2019 incursion into Syria and the US troop redeployment. In Iraq, ISIS benefited from sustained mass protests in 2024 against rival Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) and the ensuing political paralysis.²² For some, unless “root causes of ISIS’s proliferation are addressed—such as ineffective governance and service delivery, lack of economic opportunity, and sectarian division—the group [will] continue to regenerate.”²³ One woman who escaped the SDF camps bragged to Souad Mekhennet and Joby Warrick in an interview: “We will bring up strong sons and daughters and tell them about the life in the caliphate. Even if we hadn’t been able to keep it, our children will one day get it back.”²⁴

The phenomenon of female involvement in religious extremist groups, including al Qaeda, HTS, ISIS, and Boko Haram, as both recruiters and targets, has prompted fierce debate about the role of gender in terrorism and the degrees of women’s agency. The question about the future revolves around emphasizing that agency—which in turn varies depending on the group to which a woman belongs.

The classic challenge in analyzing women’s roles in terrorist movements has been combatting the plethora of stereotypes perpetuated in the media and by conventional wisdom that frame women as either “pawns” or “victims.” Women’s agency has been viewed in the popular press through a sexist, patriarchal lens, that is, through an assumption that men control power. After a terrorist attack by female operatives, experts, psychologists, and political analysts frequently engage in developing a “psychological autopsy,” examining where the perpetrator grew up, where she went to school, and what went wrong to make her turn to violence. A common assumption is that she must be depressed, crazy, suicidal, or psychopathic and, overwhelmingly, that a man must have made her do it. This denies any agency for the woman and denudes her of any political motivation. The scholarship on women’s involvement in violent extremist organizations has lacked recognition of “the possibility that a violent woman rationally chose her violent actions.”²⁵

The leaders of terrorist movements make seemingly rational calculations to select tactics and targets and to choose which operatives will be the most effective. In this way, jihadi terrorist organizations have made women the ultimate stealth weapon. By using female operatives, those organizations hope to provoke the opposing government or occupation forces into an overreaction against women in their society, a surefire way to elicit further outrage, anger, and mobilization of yet more recruits, using women’s participation to goad men into joining the organization. Further, women bombers garner significantly more media attention than their male counterparts (at a rate of eight to one), in addition to shaming the men in their society into taking action instead of letting women do “their” job.

Even in traditional roles as wives and mothers, women might still impact new iterations of ISIS or other jihadi groups that emerge in the future. However, keeping the women stateless in refugee camps indefinitely is less than ideal. In the case of Shamima Begum, who was discussed in detail in chapter 1, the British Court of Appeal decided that she had to stay in Syria, and the judges unanimously dismissed her appeal in February 2024. This decision was made despite the fact that former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent Dal Babu acknowledged that Begum was groomed as a child and was a victim of brainwashing. The lead judge in Begum’s case, Sue Carr, stated that, “It could be argued that the decision in Ms. Begum’s case was harsh. It could also be argued that Ms. Begum is the author of her own misfortune. But it is not for this court to agree or disagree with either point of view. Our only task is to assess whether the deprivation decision was unlawful.”²⁶

Even if we accept the possibility that perhaps the women and girls’ repentance is disingenuous and their enthusiasm for ISIS’s ideology remains as devoted as ever, justifying leaving the women in camps assumes that Western security services and the carceral state are no match for women and children. In the case of Begum, “we’d have to consider it much safer for this lifelong fundamentalist warrior to live in Syria, unmonitored by security services, than in the UK at his Majesty’s pleasure.”²⁷ In contrast to Begum, the German government proceeded with cases of returning women differently. Like Begum, Leonora Messing had joined ISIS as a fifteen-year-old. However, she was allowed to return to Germany with her two children and was cleared of slavery charges in May 2022.²⁸

Other women were tried and found guilty of having trafficked, enslaved, or killed Yezidi slaves in their household. For example, Jennifer Wenisch was sentenced to ten years by a Munich court “over the death of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband had enslaved who was chained beneath the hot sun and left to die of thirst.”²⁹

So despite arguments robbing women of their agency, this book has shown under which conditions they can be a threat. Women recruited by jihadi groups are portrayed as both weak and gullible but also as dangerous and radicalized. Generalizations are problematic because so much depends on the individual woman. Policies must be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, linked to the circumstances around the individual’s recruitment and what she did while in the group.

Nancy Yamout of Rescue Me, a Lebanese civil society organization engaged in de-radicalization, has opined that women can play layered, complex roles. These are not easily constructed as either modern or traditional. Even in their roles as mothers and wives, she told me, women “can have ‘ripple effects’ in their families as they motivate others to violence or encourage young men toward extremism by leveraging or buttressing popular conceptions of masculinity or the value of engaging in violent struggle. Women have a lot of sway over men, so their potential impact is great.”³⁰

Although people might assume that women’s participation in terrorism, or in any form of political violence, implies social equality between men and women. And in fact when women participate as leaders and ideologues in a terrorist group, it may portend a more equal status of women in that society or reflect a potential growing equality. If the best and the brightest women of a society become bombers, however, this eliminates a future generation of female leaders.

The threat that the women pose as returnees to Western countries is minimal. Cases of recidivism are outliers, although security personnel worry about their dedication to an extremist ideology, whether they will brainwash their children,³¹ and whether their anti-Western ideologies pose any kind of threat to social cohesion and to a vibrant democracy. As is in the case of adherence to the QAnon conspiracy theories, women can be critical nodes in how the ideology becomes mainstreamed and impacts the next generation.³²

This book has shown observable changes in women’s roles in terrorist organizations, notably within the subset of jihadi groups, where we have seen significant evolution. The late 1980s and 1990s brought the emergence of the “exploding womb,” whereby women suicide bombers disguised an improvised explosive device as a late-term pregnancy. ISIS replaced this trend with a “revolutionary womb,” meaning that women were expected and required to birth the next generation of jihadis.

The face of terrorism has changed, and women, even within highly patriarchal ideologies, are gaining entry and carving out their roles. With the increasing use of female operatives as suicide bombers and in combat on the front line by religious groups, terrorist organizations have succeeded in using Western gender stereotypes to their advantage.

To combat the four R’s used by jihadi groups (to recruit, reward, retain, and reproduce), I suggest a solution to the problem might be summarized with three D’s: delegitimize, deglamorize, and demobilize women from terrorism. What this strategy entails is showing the realities of involvement and, in the process, depriving it of its mystique. To combat the lure of involvement, and the support and appreciation the women receive from their communities, a counternarrative needs to be stressed that violence is not sanctioned by the Qur’an or the hadith. Most of all, pathways must be provided for women to exit from terrorist organizations, instead of keeping them stateless and vulnerable.³³ Few of the existing de-radicalization programs have facilities or programs specifically for women and children. But resistance to allowing the women to return to their home communities is highly problematic.

Leaving women and children in refugee camps in the Middle East does little to protect the national security of other countries. Letting the women (and children) return allows states to track and monitor them, and to offer interventions and psychosocial support, while leaving them in Iraq or Syria risks the possibility that at some point the Kurds will run out of resources, manpower, or funds to keep them in the camps. If this occurs, partly because of Turkish aggression against Kurdish militant groups, these same people will be in the wind. If they make their way back home, there will be no way to track or treat them.

The experts interviewed for this book provided unique insights into multipronged approaches to reintegrating and inoculating women and girls against future recidivism. These women are vital because they are likely the vector for cohesion and reemergence of terrorist groups in the future. Instead of a goal of de-radicalization, the aim to demobilize women—so they are no longer involved in shooting, killing, and bombing—is a better and more achievable goal. Given that women might be the source of radicalization, and some are true believers, it is potentially too lofty a goal to try and change their hearts and minds, but we can change their actions. This might break the cycles of violence that women experience.