2
Radicalization and Recruitment Online
We will stand, covered by our veils, and wrapped in our robes, weapons in hand, our children in our laps, with the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet of Allah directing and guiding us.
—al-Khansa’a website, August 2004
The role that online recruiters like Aqsa Mahmood and Hoda Muthana played in bringing other women and girls to the Islamic State (2014–2018) is reminiscent of the role that women played in helping grow al Qaeda. This chapter updates the research I did in Bombshell and contrasts how ISIS used social media and the online space compared to other jihadi groups.1
Some of the women I discuss here were introduced in the previous chapters. Umm Haritha (Canadian) and Umm Layth (British) were among the most prolific on social media, working to persuade wannabe “sisters” to travel to the Middle East to shape an extremist Islamic society.2 Places to recruit women included, as we have seen, dating sites for women looking for a holy warrior of their own or job sites where they could apply without realizing they’d end up working for ISIS.
Several websites encouraged women’s mobilization in a variety of nonviolent endeavors, including uploading videos calling on Muslim women to advocate for wearing the niqab (full veil) in Europe at a time when secular governments were working to ban them, and engaging in peaceful civil resistance on behalf of Islamic-inspired initiatives. Women online engaged in the full spectrum of roles, from exercising their right to protest to actively engaging in militancy.
According to the Israeli researcher Gabriel Weimann, jihadi groups recruited Western women online by design. Islamist movements traditionally viewed women as bastions of support. Jihadi groups stressed traditional women’s roles. Al Qaeda posted guides promoting an idealized version of the “good Muslim woman” who prioritized and devoted her life to nurturing the family and supporting her husband.3 In this context, women were expected to produce (or, rather, to reproduce) the next generation of militants by raising children to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. Al Qaeda promoted these ideals in its online magazine Beituki (Your Home), in which most of the articles focused on women’s expectations in marriage, women’s health, and advice on being a good wife, such as: “Greet your husband with a smile when he comes and a smile when he goes… . Don’t dabble in his work… . Can you imagine all the bloodshed and bones he sees every day? Your fussing only increases the pressure.”4
There seems to be a limited understanding in academic research of women’s role in violence having “implications beyond the conflict.”5 It is worth noting that women were exposed to the same jihadi propaganda as men and were impacted in comparable ways. Certainly, scenes from the battlefield affect women the same way they do men, though one might argue that women may be more affected by images of suffering children, something that might activate a maternal instinct. Nevertheless, on the basis of their online activity, we can confidently say that women post to jihadi chat rooms and other online platforms just like the men.6 The anonymity of the Internet thus affords women the opportunity to bypass cultural norms that otherwise exclude them from the training camps. Online, women can disguise their gender while participating in male-sanctioned activities. For some, the online space is inherently egalitarian in terms of access and impact, a place where women can (and do) engage in radicalization without using their real names. In doing so, they can assume a masculine voice or pseudonym if they desire. The virtual world negates physical prohibitions that prevent women from becoming involved. In contrast to training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan that served to bolster the jihadi movement in the past, on the Internet it is the individual who chooses whether (or not) to reveal their gender.
As radicalization and recruitment skyrocketed after 9/11, the role played by women became critical in the online space. Al Qaeda included an army of female organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators, and fundraisers—many of whom enlisted with their husbands or succeeded male family members who had been jailed or killed.
Following Umayma Hasan’s “Open Letter” to Muslim women, or her sisters in Islam, as she called them, al Qaeda’s media wing, which produced Inspire magazine, released Al-Shamikha (The Majestic Woman) on March 13, 2011.7 Like Al-Khansa’a (which ISIS used as the name for their all-women’s morality brigade years later), the Web-based magazine, Al-Shamika targeted women as its audience. Its first issue was a thirty-one-page glossy magazine featuring on the cover a niqab-clad woman posing with a submachine gun. Dubbed the “Jihadi Cosmo” by the Western press, the magazine advised women on finding the ideal man (“marrying a mujahideen”) and achieving the perfect milky complexion (“stay inside with your face covered”). The magazine debated the pros and cons of honey facials and urged against “towelling too forcibly.”8 Al-Shamika provided tips on first aid and etiquette, as well as advice on what women could do to become more active in jihad.
While al Qaeda was unmistakably patriarchal and excluded women from positions of leadership, compared to how ISIS treated women, al Qaeda seems like a feminist vanguard. In al Qaeda, women recruiters and propagandists led the way in disseminating radical ideologies online. Women could shame men into enlisting in jihad by demanding that they protect their sisters in Islam from sexual trespass, particularly by the kuffar, or nonbelievers. ISIS echoed this trope to motivate men to join the jihad. In “Advice for the Soldiers of the Islamic State,” Abu Hamzah Al-Muhajir portrayed jihad as the most noble path for men to take and urged them to remember who and what they were fighting for: “Know that the most difficult thing for a soldier of Allah to train for is getting used to a lot of combat. Make frequent mention of the grudges you have against the enemy, for they increase your boldness. Remember that the enemy raped your mothers and sisters, prevented you from Jumu’ah (Friday prayers) and congregational prayers, and cut you off from trade and agriculture.”9
What makes tracking women’s involvement with al Qaeda challenging is that many of the groups that began as al Qaeda affiliates switched allegiance after 2014. It is hard to know for certain what prompted some groups to abandon al Qaeda and swear oaths of allegiance to ISIS. This might have had something to do with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s lack of personal magnetism, or the fact that in 2014, ISIS was able to successfully establish a territorial caliphate and erase the international boundaries between Iraq and Syria—at least for a few years—in ISIS’s propaganda, turning back the clock to before the Sykes–Picot Agreement divvied up the Middle East like a Thanksgiving turkey.10
Al Qaeda affiliates in Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia were the focus of a tug-o-war between the groups that kept their allegiance to al Qaeda, like al Shabaab (founded in 2006), versus those that gravitated toward ISIS, like Boko Haram (founded in 2002). Other al Qaeda affiliates were less transparent about which side of the divide they aligned on; the Pakistani Taliban appeared to work with ISIS at some times but at others showed its allegiance to al Qaeda. To complicate matters, the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan comprised multiple smaller groups, including ghost groups that periodically appeared and disappeared. Ultimately, the Taliban was loyal only to the Taliban—something that explains the rise of ISIS-K (the Islamic State–Khorasan Province) and the internecine violence between these jihadi factions since 2020, and especially after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.11
This competition between al Qaeda and ISIS over the affiliates manifested in what roles women played. Despite Boko Haram’s pledge to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in August 2014, the group maintained a high rate of female engagement (as this book shows), despite the retrograde position ISIS maintained regarding women fighting on the front lines. Because the previous generation of jihadi leaders looked to women to ensure the survival of the group and concocted religious justifications to permit women to participate in violent operations, this gender equality ran contrary to ISIS’s worldview and stated policies.
There was no difference, however, when it came to who was in charge. Al Qaeda’s power base—like ISIS’s—was unambiguously masculine. Beyond its core, al Qaeda was an amorphous movement of loosely connected affiliate groups all over the world, including sympathizers—some of whom did not necessarily engage in violence. By 2014, most of the affiliates had to choose between remaining loyal to al Qaeda and Zawahiri or pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISIS.
While it was rare for women to be on the front lines (notable exceptions were highly visible female suicide bombers in Dagestan, Chechnya, Iraq, Somalia, and Nigeria), there was ample historical precedent for women to function in support roles. But there were only a few precedents for women to engage in combat.12
It is doubtful that exposure to radical materials posted online are sufficient to “turn” someone into a terrorist. An elective medium such as social media or the Internet is more likely to reinforce preexisting beliefs rather than create worldviews.13 Echoing Erin Saltman of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, it is not as though someone is shopping online for shoes at Zappos.com and a pop-up appears asking if they want to join the jihad. For people to access online extremist material, they must be actively looking for it.14
Al Qaeda exploited all forms of traditional and new media to mobilize recruits. According to the Middle East Institute’s Robyn Torok, “Targeting female jihadists is a narrowcasting strategy that Al Qaeda has been increasingly developing in recent years using … websites, online magazines and social media sites such as Facebook.”15 Twitter (X), Facebook (Meta), and other social networking sites like Tik Tok have been used to get people to “like” a particular group for recruitment purposes.16
The NPR journalist Dina Temple-Raston observed: “These days, many [recruiting videos] are decidedly less religious. They look more like something that would appear on MTV.” To attract a new generation of younger Muslims, “jihadi rap videos” featuring thumping bass and forced rhymes are all over the Internet, accompanied by verses about beheading non-Muslims to make them pay for the indignities inflicted on Muslims. Temple-Raston wrote: “The productions are clearly aimed at young people nursing resentments and looking for thrills. One video raps about the ‘angels in green, helping the mujahedeen’ while cutting to photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and homemade videos of holy warriors firing rocket-propelled grenades in the desert and shooting up cars with machine guns.”17
Marc Sageman, an American psychiatrist and former CIA operations officer, argued that certain kinds of “echo chambers” and closed networks can transform ordinary disgruntled people into terrorists.18 Before the Internet, these networks necessitated face-to-face interaction. In the 1980s and 1990s, terrorist groups might convene at a training camp in Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Bosnia. Within the Muslim diaspora, face-to-face groups comprised what Sageman called “groups of guys”—groups of immigrants, student associations, sports clubs, and study groups—that met at radical mosques and created small cells. These peer groups were instrumental in radicalizing one another, and eventually mobilized as a cohort—Sageman’s “group of guys.”19
Sageman explained how a closed information system functions in the radicalization process: “The group acted as an echo chamber, amplifying grievances, intensifying bonds to each other, and breeding values that rejected those of their host societies. These natural group dynamics resulted in a spiral of mutual encouragement and escalation, transforming a few young Muslims into dedicated terrorists willing to follow the model of their heroes and sacrifice themselves for comrades and cause.” This was true of families (kinship groups) and not just friendship networks.20
There was a significant disruption to the global jihad movement after the US invasion of Afghanistan. The older groups used social media to streamline recruiting, radicalization, and training processes. Ayman al-Zawahiri, despite being a neo-Luddite, argued that the Internet was crucial in disseminating al Qaeda’s message to the masses and subverting the media siege imposed on the jihad movement: “This is an independent battle that we must launch side by side with the military battle.”21
But Zawahiri remained cautious about the role for women until his death in 2022.
Al Qaeda stressed “self-radicalization” using websites, virtual magazines, and other forms of social media.22 One of the savviest jihadi recruiters, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s leader Anwar al-Awlaki (killed in September 2011), explained why the Internet had been so advantageous for broadening the jihad. In his treatise “44 Ways to Support Jihad,” Awlaki wrote: “The Internet has become a great medium for spreading the call of jihad and following the news of the Mujahideen. Brothers and sisters can themselves become ‘internet Mujahideen’ by establishing discussion forums for posting information relating to jihad, establishing email lists to share information with other interested brothers and sisters, and posting jihad literature and news.”23
Until ISIS established its territorial caliphate in Syria and Iraq, face-to-face mobilization was supplanted by virtual (online) radicalization for many years. Yet some of the same support and validation that people derived from offline peers could be found online, as Sageman predicted. According to Awlaki, “These forums, virtual marketplaces for extremist ideas, have become the ‘invisible hand’ that organizes terrorist activities worldwide.”24 The nature of the Internet—its ease of access, decentralized structure, anonymity, and international makeup—all provide terrorist organizations with an effective arena for action.25 The Internet appears to have made signing up for holy war easier than ever before. People who might not even have considered becoming a jihadi could now do so with the click of a mouse.
Further, the way in which social media functioned allowed the online space to proliferate. Messages, memes, and videos went viral. Jihadi groups had at their disposal a range of online tools, including bots, sock puppet accounts, and the like, to amplify their message, and social media could be used to overwhelm a potential enlistee with virtual validation that was a powerful recruitment tool. Just as cults and new religious movements had done in the 1960s, these online interactions created a kind of love bombing of validation, approval, and, for women, sisterhood.
For ISIS, recruiting efforts began in plain sight, on open API platforms, but eventually moved to semi-encrypted messaging apps. In February 2015, Twitter announced that it had suspended 125,000 ISIS-related accounts. As Silicon Valley social media companies clamped down on the online spaces exploited by jihadi groups, al Qaeda emphasized online self-radicalization using websites, virtual magazines, and other forms of social media.26 Al Qaeda (like ISIS) had to develop ever more sophisticated ways to evade artificial intelligence tools by misspelling hashtags or using homonyms. On ISIS Telegram channels (which I used through anonymous accounts for five years), the channels and chat rooms posted propaganda links daily to streaming platforms like Vimeo or JustPaste.it. ISIS members posted propaganda undetected by search engines and security personnel. Users could access pages only via an invitation link, which expired within thirty minutes or less. Maintaining membership in the channels or chat rooms on Telegram required the user to check in regularly. ISIS Telegram demanded almost continuous vigilance as users who neglected to log on might be kicked out of the “room” and denied access to the materials—exacerbating the fear of missing out.
ISIS drew supporters from all over of the world and offered immersion options in several languages. Monitoring its Telegram channels, you could distinguish the distinctive messages in English, French, Hindi, Russian, and other languages which were framed differently from its mainstream outreach in Arabic.27 The chat rooms provided an inside glimpse into how ISIS recruited Western girls in foreign languages compared with what they said to women from the region in Arabic. Beginning in November 2019, Telegram began aggressively deleting most of the official ISIS chat rooms and channels.28 Interestingly, the women’s ISIS accounts and channels were left largely unscathed by Telegram’s security crackdown, partly because these channels—like al Qaeda’s gender-focused propaganda—centered on piety, marriage, birthing children, and being good, pious Muslim women.
The women of ISIS established communication networks across multiple social media platforms, which they used to connect with—and recruit—one another. ISIS engaged in what might be considered the “hard sell,” promising new recruits four things: empowerment, participation, deliverance, and piety.29 Marriage to an ISIS fighter constituted the basis undergirding these promises. Women contributed posts to chat rooms and other virtual resources egging men on to step up and engage the enemy and shaming them if they failed to do so. As we have seen, one added element that the Internet initially offered women was anonymity. Online, women could become radicalized and inspire others without necessarily revealing who or what gender they were.30 In this way the Internet afforded women the opportunity to manipulate cultural gender norms as well as to disguise their gender while participating in traditionally male-sanctioned jihadi activities for al Qaeda. There were cases in which women assumed a masculine persona to conceal their gender online. The virtual world bypassed physical prohibitions. In contrast to the training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan that served to bolster the jihadi movement in the early period (1980s and 1990s), on the Internet the individual recruit could choose whether or not to reveal his or her gender.
Online, women could hide behind false names or anonymous identities;31 they might betray their gender by using colorful fonts or by adding (stereotypical) feminine flourishes to their postings. As Lisa McInerny explained:
Typically, though not always, profile styles differ among genders. For example, a typical female profile will have a pink or purple background, and the avatar will depict a female character. Typical female profiles also contain embellishments and motifs such as butterflies, or a close-up shot of an eye (often with mascara visible on the lashes). Usernames of those who claim to be female include a female first name and will use terms like “princess,” “girl,” “veiled,” and “beauty.”32
The role of women in terrorist recruitment has (re)activated the debate regarding women’s appropriate role in jihad, explored in chapter 1. The 2014 arrest of Shannon Maureen Conley, an American woman who was attempting to join the Islamic State, offers a foil to the women in al Qaeda. On the basis of ISIS propaganda aimed at Western women, Conley genuinely believed that she would be fighting on the front lines for the new proto-state. To this end, she trained with the US military Explorers and intended to bring this training to Syria to fight Bashar al-Assad for the Islamic State.33
In Defense of Women’s Honor: Rape and Terrorist Mobilization
The extent to which the sexual abuse of Muslim women has become part of the radicalizing rhetoric calling for the mobilization of Muslim men has differed across conflicts. Although the “defense of women’s honor” has been the linchpin of al Qaeda’s ideology since before the war in Iraq (which began in March 2003), the necessity of protecting Muslim women from occupiers took on a central role in the male mobilization for jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan.34
Jihadi websites focused on women’s chastity and its violation by (foreign) occupiers. In its address to women, Al-Qimmah, a jihadi forum, stresses: “We see women who live the life of fear and hunger in homes frightened after missing their loved ones and the absence of the guardian (mahrim)… . [Women fear] that the enemy’s soldier will break off the door … violate the honor of the beloved one.”35
While al Qaeda tried to shame Western supporters for their failure to participate in the global jihad by claiming it would result in their “sisters” in Iraq or Afghanistan being raped, ISIS used comparable tactics to attract recruits from overseas and foster a new generation of militants.36 Al Qaeda propaganda made this connection explicit in the United Kingdom. Propaganda websites that existed for over a decade after the war featured women pleading with Muslim men to join the jihad because the Americans were raping Iraqi women. Beginning in 2005, Al Qaeda generated a malign disinformation campaign using images of women being raped by US soldiers which they circulated on their social media and propaganda channels. The images, which were widely circulated, were screenshots taken from Hungarian porn, though it took me several years to track down the original source of the photos. ISIS then repurposed al Qaeda’s propaganda in 2014 by including the same screen grabs from Hungarian porn and using the fake images to justify ISIS’s tactics and urge men to join the fray.
The scholar Shamita Das Dasgupta, an Indian scholar and activist and the founder of Manavi, explains how sexual trespass (actual or constructed, for example, in nonfiction) and the prospect of miscegenation (race mixing) inflames men, especially when perpetrated by an “other.” Many of the well-worn racist tropes during the American Reconstruction period, featuring sexually rapacious Black men, reemerged in the jihadist propaganda, although in reverse. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, proclaimed, “Sunnis who managed to escape from the hell of the Crusader bombing were seized by the treacherous hands of the treacherous corps and others … desecrated the women’s honor.”37 In jihadist rhetoric, female sexuality and bodies become a fetish in the discourse demonizing Western men.38
The attack on Abir al-Jenabi, a fourteen-year-old girl from Mahmudiya (Yusufiyah), Iraq, who was stalked, raped, killed, and immolated and her family killed by US soldiers, was an inflection point for jihadi recruitment. Each of the five soldiers took turns raping the fourteen-year-old girl. Then they shot her in the head and tried to conceal their crimes by setting her body and the family home on fire. Fueled by alcohol confiscated from Iraqis, coupled with talk of revenge against Iraqi civilians, the US soldiers viewed the Jenabi family as scapegoats for their real and imagined suffering. The platoon, referred to as the “Black Hearts unit,” has become a case study used by the US military on what not to do in a theater of war. The military’s analysis found that there were structural conditions leading to the crime: The continued exposure to combat operations, with limited support, increased casualties within the company and platoon. “The resulting downward spiral was compounded by ‘fatigue, anxiety and panic attacks, increased irritability, and obsessive compulsive tendencies’ as well as substance abuse using illegally obtained alcohol and drugs.”39
The high-profile rape and murders led to al Qaeda’s alleged creation of a brigade, Dhat al Nitaqayn, a commando unit composed exclusively of women.40 The group announced plans to form a special “Abir al-Jenabi Unit,” named for the fourteen-year-old.41 The 2006 gang rape was one of the most widely reported events in the Arab press. Newspapers and television reports carried explicit and detailed descriptions of the young girl’s attack, rape, and murder, and the subsequent cover-up of those crimes. Al-Rafidain News reported:
Steven Green [one of the five GIs], a human monster wearing the uniform of the occupation […] raped an innocent girl not more than 15, and then killed her after he killed her father, mother, and little sister. After drinking wine with three other occupation soldiers, Green headed for the girl’s house in Al Mahmudiyah, where he killed her three family members in cold blood. He and another friend raped the girl before shooting her twice.42
Pointing to the assault on Abir al-Jenabi and her family, the al Qaeda propagandist Malika el-Aroud elaborated on the dangers to Muslim women posed by Western occupying forces. She also reiterated allegations that US soldiers raped and impregnated Iraqi female detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.43 Although the attack against Jenabi was true, the forced impregnation of prisoners was not.
Not all the sexual abuse allegations were fabricated. On February 19, 2007, another woman accused Iraqi forces of gang rape. According to reports, Iraqi interior ministry forces detained a woman, identified by the pseudonym Sabrin al-Janabi (no relation to Abir), on suspicion that she had been aiding insurgents. “Al-Janabi told Al-Jazeera television later that day that four officers raped her over a four-hour period. She claimed the officers threatened to kill her if she talked of the attack, and that they took her picture in order to remember her. She was freed after U.S. forces arrived on the scene.” She stated, “What is the value of the security plan if our honor is violated?”44
There were also a handful of cases in which soldiers reportedly violated Iraqi women held at Abu Ghraib, which became major propaganda tools. In addition to the well-publicized crimes perpetrated against the male prisoners exposed by the journalist Seymour M. Hersh, female prisoners were subjected to atrocities as well.45 Amnesty International interviewed several women who had been released from Abu Ghraib and found that “many complained of having been beaten, threatened with rape, verbally abused, and held in solitary confinement for long periods of time.” According to one Human Rights Watch report, women in Iraqi jails have been routinely threatened with rape since the invasion in 2003.46
Al Qaeda’s jihadi websites exploited the crime against Abir al-Jenabi’s family to mobilize new supporters throughout the world. The websites declared that the occupiers’ vileness should inspire Muslim men to rise and join the jihad against the nonbelievers. A statement issued on the website of the Islamic Renewal Organization condemned the “latest crime” of Western soldiers, who “violate the honor of Muslims in their houses” by “raping them and then following up their horrible crime by burning the bodies to conceal it from the people.” Denouncing “the crimes of the oppressors, which the Glorious Qur’an told us about,” the statement pledged, “The more the enemy persists in its tyranny and contentiousness, the more we persist in continuing on the road of Jihad, which is our way of raising injustice from all Muslims […] and destroying the signs of infidelity and disbelief.”47
While the attack on Abir al-Jenabi appears to have been the exception rather than the rule, this one incident was nevertheless sufficient to provide oxygen to a malign information campaign. This one confirmed case gave credibility to the argument that American soldiers were sexually abusing Iraqi women in great numbers. In amplifying the crime, al Qaeda was able to shame Muslims into participating in the global jihad by connecting their lack of engagement to the danger America posed to their sisters, mothers, and daughters. In its propaganda, as we have seen. ISIS recycled the images that al Qaeda had used a decade earlier to allege that US soldiers were assaulting Muslim women. The doctored images and recycled Hungarian porn were not scenes from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Although bogus, they were designed to instigate outrage in whoever saw them. Yet at the same time, ISIS itself was abusing the women it professed to defend—Sunni women who had immigrated to the caliphate as what the media dubbed “jihadi brides.”
Abu Musab al Zarqawi encouraged women to volunteer for martyrdom operations in Iraq or engage in militant activities against those who humiliated the faith. The result was to equate the “purity of the faith” to the sexual purity of its women.
Al Qaeda continued to address women’s roles in its publications. Ansar al-Mujahidin added a “women’s section” to its website.48 In 2004, a webzine called Al-Khansa’a, named for the pre-Islamic female poet, was published by the Women’s Information Office in the Arab Peninsula.49 The issue, with a bright pink cover page and gold-embossed lettering, appeared in August 2004 with a lead article titled “Biography of the Female Mujahedeen.” The webzine was designed specifically to appeal to women, and its contents included a range of articles covering topics from the proper social behavior of women and how women should support their male jihadi relatives, to exercises to strengthen women’s bodies to handle their domestic duties, to the occasional recipe.50 Despite its exploration of the female mujahideen, however, Al-Khansa’a stopped short of calling for women’s military participation in jihad.
Subsequently, online jihadi forums proliferated after the release of Al-Khansa’a. Those forums sought to involve women not in support roles but as frontline fighters. One such forum, Al-Hebah, asked women: “Sister, do you fear the horror of death? Don’t you wish for such an end—an easy transition from this world to paradise?”51 Al Qaeda’s Al-Shamikha magazine (2011), geared toward Muslim women, explained the need to incorporate women into jihad and ensure their support for the cause:
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.52
By 2007, Zarqawi’s female suicide bombers had become the weapon of choice for Al Qaeda in Iraq. Even after he was assassinated on June 7, 2006, the tactic continued. As it became more commonplace, al Qaeda–affiliated groups supplemented their recruitment profiles of female suicide bombers to include converts, women old enough to have been grandmothers, teenage girls, and even very young children to evade counterterrorism that tended to focus exclusively on men. Suicide bombings against Shi’ite civilians were a leitmotif and trademark of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Women were instrumental in penetrating soft targets, especially those that mostly consisted of Iraqi civilians. This reflected women’s (and later children’s) abilities to blend in with the target as attacks became more difficult to perpetrate.53 These attacks persisted despite significant security operations mounted by local Iraqi authorities (supported by US troops) to preempt “martyrdom operations.” Iraqi sources in Diyala province claimed that other than Muriel Degauque, all the female bombers were native-born ethnic Iraqis.
When the enemy raped women at checkpoints, the terrorists funneled the victims into suicide bomber units. In the absence of rape by soldiers from the other side, some militant groups opted to rape the women themselves. Rape became such a fundamental recruiting tool that in February 2009, Samira Ahmed Jassim, known as Um al-Mu’emin, Mother of the Faithful, was arrested for having orchestrated the rapes of eighty girls in Baghdad and Diyala province to recruit them as suicide bombers for Ansar al-Sunnah, a Sunni group with links to al Qaeda. Jassim’s logic was that once the girls had been raped, only an act of martyrdom could eradicate the shame they had brought upon their families and their communities. By the time of her arrest, twenty-eight of the eighty victims had been deployed as suicide bombers to kill tribal leaders who worked with the Americans and Iraqi security forces, as well as the Iranian al-Quds Brigade.54
After her arrest in January 2009, Jassim admitted to singling out women who were suffering from emotional or psychological problems or from a previous history of abuse.55 The Iraqi prime minister at the time, Nuri al-Maliki, issued a statement in 2008 that over 60 percent of suicide attacks perpetrated by women in Diyala had been coerced. On jihadi websites like the Islamic Front for Iraqi Resistance, al Qaeda denied allegations it had coercively recruited female bombers, claiming the organization would never be involved in violence against the innocent Iraqi people.56
Not all the female recruits were successful. Several women en route to execute suicide attacks changed their minds at the last minute. To offset this possibility, female bombers in Diyala were not always in control of their own suicide belts so the insurgents might detonate them remotely either before the women reached their designated target or as soon as they arrived. In all, as many as 40 percent of the female suicide operations were preempted or aborted between 2005 and 2011, or the women were killed before reaching their targets.57
The United Nations Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee stated in 2019: “In many cases, wives and children of ISIL fighters were themselves victims of … violence and may have been coerced into facilitating crimes. However, it has been reported that judges and prosecutors are not taking these mitigating circumstances into account.”58
Terrorist groups may transform women into human bombs, but the women are victims—of the conflict, of their attackers, of the terrorist group—and afterwards they are re-victimized by society. We cannot help but feel some sympathy for them, and yet they have killed and maimed hundreds of innocents. There is no question that some of these women were attacked by members of the security forces or by the forces of the occupation. Transforming them into terrorist operatives was unambiguous and purposeful on the part of the terrorist groups. The terrorist organizations have used these attacks as propaganda to mobilize men and women into the movement. Female suicide bombers (shahidas) are portrayed as chaste wives, “brides of Allah,” and mothers of the revolution. In other words, they can completely transform themselves with this one act. No longer victims of the occupier, they are now considered heroes.
It is important to understand that women can be as radicalized as men, and some may be more radical than men, but some may also be victims at the same time that they are victimizers. Dee Graham, Edna Rawlings, and Roberta Rigsby suggest that these women’s social relationships with men constitute a form of “Stockholm syndrome.” In this sense, women’s violent behavior can be explained as caused by men.59
Although the actual number of Iraqi women sexually victimized by US, British, or NATO soldiers was miniscule compared to historical cases of war and occupation (Vietnam, Germany, Ukraine) where women were victimized in much greater numbers, the mere fact that there were instances of sexualized violence whipped up jihadi sentiment on the battlefield. When the foreign soldiers exercised restraint vis-à-vis the civilian population, the terrorist organizations attacked Muslim women themselves in hopes of turning them into human bombs.60
In addition to al Qaeda naming its rocket the Abir, after the teenager raped and murdered in Mahmudiya, the attack on the Jenabi family resulted in the kidnapping and public execution of two US soldiers, Thomas Lowell Tucker of Madras, Oregon, and Kristian Menchaca of Houston, members of the 101st Airborne Division. While the men did not participate in the attack, they were members of the same unit. A few weeks later, the Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq released a four-and-a-half-minute video showing, in the words of the Jawa Report, a blog dealing with Islamic terrorism, “the mutilated corpses of the two American soldiers the group stated to have captured on June 16, 2006. The extremely graphic footage is preceded by an audio clip of a past [Osama] bin Laden speech, and an audio track from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is heard over the scenes in which the Mujahideen display and prod the corpses.”61 Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, had been killed in a US airstrike less than two weeks before the American soldiers were murdered.
The bodies were eventually discovered, dumped near an electrical plant, on an anonymous tip, which ended a manhunt by eight thousand US Air Force and Marine and Iraqi troops, after they had raided twelve villages.62 The New York Post reported that “the two soldiers were viciously tortured and suffered severe trauma before they were killed—likely by having their throats slashed by the new al Qaeda leader in Iraq, who was identified as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir [whose real name was Ayyub al-Masri].”63 In the video, Muhajir used the Arabic word nahr, a term that refers to butchering sheep by slitting their throats. The atrocity was a way of establishing al-Muhajir’s brand as the new head of Al Qaeda in Iraq.64
The kidnapping and torture of Menchacha and Tucker a mere three months after Abir’s killing was clearly retaliation. US military analysts drew the connection, arguing that, by contrast, “preserving the dignity of indigenous people increases the probability of a counterinsurgent’s tactical, operational, and strategic success.”65 It was of the utmost importance that American soldiers not target Iraqi women in sexual ways. Abusing the population’s women might have the desired effect of demoralizing the men in the short term, but it would only increase the number of women being mobilized into the movement.66
While Ayman al-Zawahiri reassured the conservative wing of al Qaeda that there were no women in the organization, the number of suicide bombings perpetrated by women in the Iraqi affiliate soared. After Muriel Degauque became the first female suicide bomber in 2005, there was an 800 percent increase in female suicide bombings in Diyala province alone.67 Zawahiri received letters from women challenging his position on their participation in jihad, but he also received dozens of letters from men who insisted that women should stick to raising children according to Islamic principles and should eschew jihad. Because of the generational shift between the new and the old al Qaeda, the organization was forced to balance the desires of younger members with the ideologies of an older, more conservative constituency, such as the Taliban, who preferred to sequester women altogether. By playing to both sides of the generational divide, the leadership of al Qaeda was able to straddle the middle ground, appealing to the broadest possible membership: traditional conservatives, who would not approve of women on the front lines, and the younger progressives, who might be more supportive of women’s engagement in jihad.
To claim that the jihadi groups might be inconsistent or disingenuous is neither surprising nor unexpected. We can expect terrorist groups to be innovative, and not always ideologically consistent. What is apparent is that there was a fissure within al Qaeda and among its affiliates around the issue of women: whether to allow them to fight and how to “motivate” them to do so. The younger generation of al Qaeda leaders—and especially its affiliate organizations— supported a greater role for women. Zawahiri, who was less popular and less charismatic than some of the affiliate leaders (such as Anwar Awlaki, slain head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who inspired men and women), appreciated the generational divide.
The American-born al Shabaab leader Omar Hammami employed female suicide bombers in Somalia. In 2012, Indian security officials claimed that two dozen Pakistani women were being trained to be suicide bombers for Lashkar-e-Taiba as a new unit, the Dukhtareen-e-Taiba (Daughters of the Righteous).68
In order for al Qaeda to maintain its position and primacy among the affiliated jihadi groups, a degree of flexibility was required. This capitulation to innovation (bida’a) was evident in Internet recruitment as well as in who was permitted to be a martyr. Nevertheless, while the increase in women’s frontline activities and online involvement might imply that they were gaining ground in patriarchal terrorist organizations, that was not the case. The schism that emerged in al Qaeda led not to the group’s allowing women a greater role but to the rise of ISIS, a group that had a far more regressive view of women than Al Qaeda in Iraq ever did.
Jihadi women continued to be relegated largely to caregiving roles that did not extend beyond the founding ideologue Abdullah Azzam’s traditional interpretation of womanhood. For feminist scholars, the women of al Qaeda solidified gender norms by writing from the private sphere and speaking in defense of the nation. In doing so, they were not acting outside of traditional female-gendered roles even as they goaded men into action, most often to symbolically defend their imagined nation-states—an image in which the nation is often conflated with the women themselves—from other masculine aggressors.
In contrast to jihadi exploitation of women online, some NGOs looked to women to lead de-radicalization efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism. Several organizations have worked to inoculate women against online radical messages. Once such group, Sisters Against Violent Extremism (SAVE), since renamed Women without Borders (WwB), explained: “Women as mothers and sisters suffer when a member of the family loses his path and goes towards extremism. Extremists often impose their extremist beliefs on the female members in their families, preventing them from receiving an education and working.”69 Stakeholders and regional experts agree with the international partners that, in order for policies and programs for preventing and countering violent extremism to respond to the specific needs of women, it is necessary for the strategies to be anchored in evidence-based, nuanced, and context-specific information.70 Early results from the grassroots organizations fighting violent extremism seemed to be promising. This led to a proliferation of women-led initiatives. Groups like Women Without Borders, SAVE, USAID Conflict Management and Mitigation, and the Organization for Cooperation and Security’s Anti-Terrorism Unit all created separate portfolios dedicated to engaging women. Their focus is to prevent women’s extremism in the first place, so that female leaders do not become cannon fodder for terrorist organizations but rather provide positive models for the next generation of young women and girls to emulate.