Introduction

Misconceptions about Women and Terror

Women in violent extremist groups are assumed to lack agency. This is because most of the women involved in jihadi organizations are veiled. The media almost always frame women’s violent motivations as a reaction to a negative event or the result of male influence. Furthermore, as many assumptions as there are regarding women’s involvement in violent extremism, there are yet more inaccuracies about women involved with jihadi groups. While some scholars have acknowledged women’s involvement in jihad, they also divest them of political motivation and rationale, portraying women primarily as victims, manipulated, drugged, or coerced in a variety of ways. For these scholars, women’s involvement in terrorism can only be interpreted as peripheral and secondary to men’s. As this book will show, however, that is not the case.

A classic example of this fallacious assumption was the incident involving the suicide bomber Djennet Abdurakhmanova. After Djennet and her co-conspirator Maryam Sharipova exploded their improvised devices aboard two subway cars in Moscow in 2010, the media narrative fixated on the fact that Djennet’s husband, Umalat Magomedov, had been assassinated by the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) in an “anti-insurgency security operation” the prior year and surmised that she’d been radicalized by his death.¹ Accompanying the media narrative was an image of a then fifteen-year-old veiled Djennet, sitting on her husband’s lap, wielding a pistol.²

This image of an armed Djennet was featured in almost all the coverage of the attack without any hint of irony, though clearly, Djennet had been sufficiently radicalized while Umalat was still alive. Yet veiled women are routinely portrayed in the media as pawns of men. Some analysts go so far as to argue that the mere fact that the women are veiled implies a lack of bodily autonomy and serves as evidence of their submissiveness.³

Jihadi groups are aware of this stereotype and have used gender constructs to their advantage to penetrate difficult-to-access targets, for example, deploying women concealing an improvised explosive device beneath loose-fitting traditional clothing like a niqab. This has sent a strong message to the men in their communities: that women were willing to do what was needed when men hesitated. In effect, jihadi women are subversive and transgressive actors who challenge the very foundations of male identity and manhood in patriarchal settings. As the gender studies scholar Julie Rajan told me, however, “This kind of transgressive speech is sanctioned only when women speak in defense of the nation, and hence, their violence is directed to maintaining the nation.”⁴

Even in the conflicts where women have taken a proactive role, they are still portrayed as lacking agency. The right-wing Israeli politician and academic Anat Berko, who explored the role of Palestinian women in resistance movements (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade), nevertheless portrayed them as pawns. For Berko, these women were not the agents of their own involvement. As in the historical depictions of women in the Red Army Faction in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy, women were assumed to be involved in terrorism because of a relationship with men involved in those movements. As Berko explained: “There are women who were drawn into terrorism through Internet chat groups with men from the Arab world. Their communications began innocently as male–female exchanges, and the men used romantic manipulation to recruit the women to terrorist activities… . Among the women interviewed, only one actively took the initiative (although supported by men) and planned and carried out a murder.”⁵

In a 2016 roundtable discussion among three members of the House Committee for Homeland Security and three experts on the Islamic State, New York Democratic congresswoman Kathleen Rice, a former district attorney for Nassau County, stated: “When it comes to conversations about ISIS and women in particular, there’s a tendency to oversimplify, to focus on women as victims, maybe even to think of Muslim women as docile and obedient. There’s no question that many, many women have been victimized by ISIS. But there are women who are actually going to join the fight—not on the frontline but as enforcers, as wives, as mothers.”⁶

In the literature, the women are painted as victims of society, victims of colonialism, victims of the patriarchy, and victims of terrorist leaders.⁷ This book offers readers a more nuanced range of motivations and demystifies the ways in which jihadi groups radicalize, recruit, and deploy women in the service of terrorism. I suggest that existing assumptions about male dominance might be overstated, that it might be the women who influence the men rather than the other way around. In some instances, such as the case of Hayat Boumedienne, the widow of Ahmedy Coulibaly, who carried out the mass casualty attack against a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015, the women were already radicalized before marriage.⁸ Sometimes evidence arises months or even years after an attack suggesting that the women were the source of the radical beliefs rather than the men, challenging the sexist paradigm that women are merely pawns with no agency.

It is worth noting that what motivates a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in London is likely different from what motivates older Western converts to join extremist groups and participate in their operations. In fact, as the Washington Post noted in 2015: “A surging number of young people from non-Muslim homes are flocking to the Middle East to heed the call of violent jihad. It is happening … as converts emerge as some of the most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam.”⁹ Younger girls are more likely to have been born Muslim and grown up in an assimilated household, whereas the older women are more likely to be converts with minimal knowledge of Arabic, the Islamic faith, the Sunnah (traditions and practices), or the hadith (sayings) of the Prophet Muhammad. The category of female converts to Islam has been a much-maligned and poorly understood phenomenon in analyses of the global jihad. Ever since Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert to Islam, detonated a car bomb against US troops in Iraq in 2005, the jihadi groups have deliberately recruited female converts. Analyzing cases of other women like Colleen LaRose (aka “Jihad Jane”) and Jamie Ramirez (aka “Jihad Jamie”) provides insights into why extremist groups like al Qaeda deemed blond, blue-eyed converts especially advantageous conscripts. Many such converts also joined the Islamic State; others joined al Qaeda affiliates like al Shabaab or Hay’at Tahrir al Sham. Some traveled abroad to perpetrate attacks, while others planned incidents closer to home. A common theme was that jihadi groups leveraged the converts’ gullibility and lack of knowledge to convince them that Islam supports terrorism. Most Muslims know this to be false.

In the years since 2019, when ISIS lost control of its territorial “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, over a dozen women have been tried by the US Department of Justice for material support of a foreign terrorist organization. A significant number of these women were converts. In June 2022, Allison Elizabeth Fluke-Ekren (whose nom de guerre was Umm Mohammed al-Amriki) pled guilty to providing material support to a terrorist organization while in Mosul, Iraq.¹⁰ Far from being an uneducated, gullible child, she was educated and had studied biology at the University of Kansas before traveling to Syria in 2012 to participate in the “lesser” jihad. (I explain the different types of jihad later on and why this is relevant.)

Fluke-Ekren’s story mirrors that of dozens of converts, like Kimberly Polman, older women with checkered pasts for whom conversion to Islam offered a clean slate. Polman says in a documentary that she was in a “terrible space” when she was found online by an ISIS member, Abu Aymenn, who would later become her husband:

Back in Canada, my children had grown and they were moving on with their own directions, so I found myself alone with an empty nest and I wasn’t ready for that. [Abu Aymenn] was a very vibrant personality, not what you would ever have expected for … a terrorist.

He said, “Come where you’re actually loved, where you’re actually needed,” because he knew… . I felt like I was really not needed at the time, at all.¹¹

Polman went to Syria in 2015. Fluke-Ekren first joined Ansar al Shari’a (the group responsible for the 2012 Benghazi attack) in 2016 but changed affiliation to ISIS with her second husband, a battalion commander for a unit of snipers. He died in an airstrike that year.¹² Then in the summer of 2016, Fluke-Ekren married her third husband, a Bangladeshi ISIS member who built drones for ISIS and worked “attaching chemical weapons onto drones to drop chemical bombs from the air.”¹³ He was later killed. Fluke-Ekren was married a total of five times as of 2022.

Fluke-Ekren was guilty of monstrous acts in addition to providing material support for a terrorist organization, such as human trafficking, including marrying off her own thirteen-year-old daughter to an older ISIS foreign fighter who repeatedly raped the girl. During her trial, at which Fluke-Ekren pled guilty, “her daughter Leyla Ekren … shared disturbing details about the sexual and emotional abuse she faced … when she lived with her mother in Syria.”¹⁴

Fluke-Ekren allegedly led an all-women brigade, Khatiba Nusaybah, in Syria, comprised “of over 100 female ISIS fighters—some of whom were as young as 10—training them to use AK-47s, grenades and suicide belts.”¹⁵ It is noteworthy that Fluke-Ekren’s disciples were never deployed on the battlefield—unlike the women who detonated themselves on behalf of Al Qaeda in Iraq the decade before. In fact, hundreds of women who joined ISIS went on to occupy the foreigner wings of refugee and detention camps in Syria and Iraq like al-Hol and al-Roj. According to UNICEF, of al-Hol’s approximately 62,000 residents in 2021 and 53,000 in 2023, an estimated 80 percent were women and children.¹⁶

This book contends that the role for women in ISIS was remarkably narrow—despite some exaggerated claims in ISIS propaganda about women fighting that had lured them there in the first place. ISIS recruited women on an unprecedented scale using new technologies and social media platforms but also tried-and-true tactics and messaging. ISIS posted images of women fully armed with automatic rifles on patrol or splayed across Toyota trucks, yet we have scant evidence that ISIS deployed women on the front lines—in sharp contrast with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) from 2005 to 2010. AQI, the forerunner group to ISIS, used female bombers with such efficacy that in 2007, Shi‘a shrines banned women from entering for fear that they might be suicide bombers seeking to destroy their sectarian enemies. We can compare the processes by which jihadi groups recruit women by examining the cases of al Qaeda’s Muriel Degauque, Colleen LaRose, and, more recently, Allison Fluke-Ekren, Kimberly Polman, and Gigi Giampietro.

The US government’s legal filing against Fluke-Ekren laid out a life “of torture and violence, which … she inflicted on her younger brother, her children and her husbands, behavior that she allegedly took from her home to battlefields in foreign countries after she became radicalized.”¹⁷ Fluke-Ekren confessed to planning attacks within the United States, notably the use of vehicles packed with explosives which she planned to park at shopping malls and detonate remotely to maximize casualties. A second plot was to attack an American college campus in the Midwest with explosives. These attacks were inspired—but not directed—by ISIS. The difference is more than merely semantic. “Directed” attacks tended to be more sophisticated, took longer to plan, involved sustained training in a Syrian or Iraqi training camp, and usually generated a high volume of casualties. Attacks such as those in November 2015 on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, in April 2016 at the Brussels airport, and in July 2016 at a café in Dhaka, Bangladesh, were orchestrated by ISIS’s central planning war committee and planned by high-ranking emirs (commanders).

Attacks that are “inspired” might be attributed to ISIS after the fact or, in some instances, during the melee. Such attacks did not necessarily generate high casualties. (The Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando in June 2016 was the exception.) ISIS preferred high-profile mass casualty attacks that generated sizable media attention. This is, after all, one of the main goals of terrorism—to terrify the entire population and spread a political message.

Jihadi groups were reportedly disappointed by the marginal impact of the February 1993 truck bomb, the first terrorist attack directed against the World Trade Center in New York, in which a parked Ryder van laden with explosives left a one-hundred-foot crater but killed only six people and failed to topple the twin towers, something that was not accomplished until 9/11.¹⁸

Prior to her arrest, Fluke-Ekren abandoned plans to detonate explosives-laden vans when her husband convinced her that the likelihood of generating a high casualty rate was minimal. She considered any attack “that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” according to court documents.¹⁹

Fluke-Ekren fits the template of ISIS women who advocated for frontline participation but were denied. The women may have been inspired to commit acts of violence by ISIS ideology but were never specifically directed to carry out attacks. This includes instances when the women were just as radicalized as—if not more so than—the men. In some cases it was jihadi women who encouraged the men to be proactive. Tashfeen Malik, with her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, attacked and killed fourteen people at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, during a Christmas party in December 2015. At the time, it was the largest mass casualty shooting in the United States since Sandy Hook three years before. Farook and Malik were judged to be “ ‘homegrown violent extremists’ … inspired by foreign terror groups.” The FBI director at the time, James Comey, testified that Farook and Malik “discussed jihad and martyrdom” even before their marriage and had spent a year preparing for the attack.²⁰

During their killing spree at Farook’s office Christmas party, Malik (but not Farook) posted her allegiance to ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook. After the attack, inside the couple’s Redlands townhouse, authorities found twelve pipe bombs and the tools to make dozens of improvised explosive devices. There were also thousands of rounds of ammunition stored in their garage.²¹

In August 2019, a Tennessee-licensed clinical social worker named Georgianna (Gigi) Giampietro was indicted for providing material support to Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS), a Syrian jihadist group affiliated with al Qaeda. In 2016, Giampietro communicated with an individual who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, telling the agent that she planned on traveling to Syria to meet her fiancé, a jihadist fighter named Abu Abdullah. The agent testified in court that Giampietro wanted to fight alongside her future husband and encouraged her contacts to travel to Syria as well. According to the indictment, Giampietro provided specific advice about “how to travel without being detected by law enforcement, including cutting off contact with others, purchasing round-trip tickets, and traveling through Italy instead of London.”²² Giampietro sent several Western Union transfers to alleged jihadists in Syria via Egypt and Turkey. Giampietro, who had flirted with joining numerous groups before engaging with HTS, embodied several common characteristics of “seekers”—people who move from religion to religion, cause to cause, or movement to movement.

Like Fluke-Ekren, Giampietro was a convert. She pleaded guilty in 2022 to providing material support to a terrorist organization, Hay’at Tahrir al Sham.²³ In Giampietro’s case, the US Department of Justice and the Nashville FBI had amassed hundreds of pages of documents, reports, copies of emails and social media posts—including the testimony of undercover agents—to ensure Giampietro’s conviction. Over the course of working as the government’s expert witness for a year, I reviewed these communications in addition to Giampietro’s college thesis, in which she explored the ins and outs of terrorist financing. It was clear she knew what she was doing and where the money she raised was going despite claiming ignorance.

Giampietro had converted to Islam after a checkered past—something common among female Muslim converts who become radicalized. The contrast between women who are born into the faith versus converts points out some of the differences in how and why women become involved in extremism in the first place. Some converts feel the necessity to prove they are just as dedicated to the religion as people born into the faith, if not more so. But the converts lack the ballast to challenge fringe interpretations. There are distinctions between jihadi women in conflict zones (Syria, Iraq, Libya), like Sajida Atrous al Rishawi, and the women who convert to Islam and operate in the West, like Degauque, Fluke-Ekren, and Giampietro, who embodied a fundamental misunderstanding of Islam’s theological position on violence and on civilian casualties which many converts mistakenly hold. Fluke-Ekren’s support for radical Islamic causes fulfilled a psychological need. According to a former friend, her engagement with a militant group “was a way for her to feel important” and provided “a sense of purpose.”²⁴ Polman also felt lost and unappreciated. Her need for meaning combined with a midlife crisis had made her vulnerable to recruitment, and her ISIS husband appealed to this vulnerability.²⁵

In the psychology of terrorism, Arie Kruglanski calls this a “significance-quest,” that is, a search for meaning and an expression of the need for belonging, purpose, and social worth. While the need to feel significant is universal, the means available for satisfying this need depend on the sociocultural context in which one’s values are embedded.²⁶ The British-born jihadi schoolgirl Shamima Begum, while not a convert, articulated this sentiment unequivocally when she explained, “I always wanted to be part of a community, because when I was young I felt like an outsider, so I just wanted to be a part of something.”²⁷ For converts, being part of something greater than themselves, feeling that they are making a difference, and hoping to erase a perhaps checkered past with a fresh start can all sound very tempting. But the very same factors that led them to convert also make them easy targets for radicalization. The desire to engage in something bigger than themselves is exploited by recruiters and propagandists, as they are led to believe that all worldly pursuits pale when compared with serving the jihad. There is an emphasis on the idea that women have a unique role to play and are integral to the advancement of the political and military goals of jihad.²⁸

Colleen (Fatima) LaRose christened herself “Jihad Jane.” She was arrested for plotting to kill a Swedish cartoonist named Lars Vilks in March 2010. LaRose was not a suicide bomber like Degauque. Since her arrest, she has been interviewed extensively and was the subject of a documentary by the Irish television network RTÉ. In these interviews, LaRose provided extensive details about the process of her involvement, how she was recruited and what actions she took as a woman in al Qaeda. A second convert and co-conspirator, Jamie Ramirez, was also arrested for her part in the plot against Vilks and provided additional insights from her experience of moving from online radicalization to engaging in violent or illegal acts offline—in real life.

Degauque’s suicide bombing and LaRose’s and Ramirez’s high-profile arrests underscore the central role played by female converts in terrorist operations. On June 2, 2006, a German convert to Islam, a woman known only as Sonja B., was arrested before she could carry out an attack in Iraq. Her husband was arrested in Morocco along with sixteen co-conspirators. Mohamed Reha, a leading Moroccan terrorist within al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, claimed that al Qaeda had the resources to mobilize dozens of female bombers on a moment’s notice. He claimed, in 2005, “The [female] partners [wives] of several terrorists detained in Belgium [are] ready to carry out suicide attacks.”²⁹ While few women in Europe ever self-detonated as Reha predicted, after the emergence of ISIS, women took on a new and terrifying role.

It is imperative not to conflate conversion to Islam with violent radicalization as some analysts have done, using conversion as a proxy measure.³⁰ In recent years, against a backdrop of declining religiosity, the percentage of people who claim to be atheists has increased, and yet conversion to Islam has steadily increased.³¹ Data show that Muslim converts (male and female) tend to join jihadist groups at disproportionately higher rates—around three to four times higher—than the rate for natural-born Muslims.³² As many as one in six Europeans who left Europe and joined ISIS were converts. In some countries, such as France, the ratio was even higher: about one in four.³³ Few people, converts included, turn to violence, but there have been enough jihadi terrorists who were converts that it is worthwhile to investigate the correlation. Graeme Wood explored this challenge in The Atlantic in 2021: “Vanishingly few converts turn to jihadism, but enough jihadists are converts to invite speculation about the connection. The Islamic State once liked to put converts in front of its cameras, but even off-camera the converts [were] overrepresented.”³⁴

There are tens of thousands of female converts in Europe and North America, many of whom converted to marry Muslim husbands, while others converted because they perceived Islam to be a superior faith to their religion at birth.³⁵ The philosopher and legal scholar Azizah Yahia al-Hibri notes that many women who convert to Islam cite passages from the Qur’an to support their belief that Islam liberates them sexually and spiritually and supports their right to education, to work, and to keep the money that they earn. They state that both sexes are not only equal but also complement each other.³⁶

Militant jihadi groups deliberately seek out converts because they find them easier to radicalize, since they are more ignorant of the rules and regulations governing the faith regarding violence. Converts are malleable and more easily persuaded to engage in violence even though it violates the core teachings of the Islamic faith. They can be molded by fiery clerics pushing a false narrative about the permissibility of killing civilians in the name of Islam. Because the convert is a blank slate, she (or he) can be persuaded to believe virtually anything. Converts (or secular Muslim reverts, with limited knowledge of Islam) can be convinced that the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad permitted the use of violence against civilians.³⁷ The convert is unable to debate the finer points of Islamic hadith and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) or dispute the jihadi interpretation of the enemy. Jihadi extremists point to Surah At-Tawba 5, which reads, “Kill them, kill them wherever you find them.”³⁸ Taken out of context, the Qur’anic verse appears to justify violence, even against civilians. The convert, however, doesn’t understand the larger context of the verse and probably cannot cite Surah At-Tawba 1, which explains at the outset who the mushrikeen, or polytheists, were. Converts generally do not speak Arabic (certainly at the outset) and cannot challenge radical interpretations. In the absence of Arabic fluency, the Qur’an and tenets of the faith need to be translated for the convert. If converts fall under the influence of a radical sheikh, or a religious representative who spoon-feeds them a distortion of the faith, they lack the basis from which to challenge this obvious bastardization of Islam.

Al Qaeda recruiters sought female converts for attacks and martyrdom operations, favoring women because they could pass more easily through security checkpoints and were less likely to be searched by security personnel. The jihadis believed that a convert’s (blond) hair, white skin, and US passport (and, in the case of LaRose, her Texas twang) allowed the women readier access to their targets. Many of these older female converts had comparable backgrounds and profiles: they converted after a difficult life of alcohol, drug, or sexual abuse and were often the victims of intimate partner violence, domestic violence, or childhood abuse. Because of this history, they were more vulnerable to charismatic recruiters offering them the chance to reinvent themselves.

The women who have been arrested for providing material support depended on interpretations they were given or relied on what they found online doing their own research. LaRose (like Giampietro) never visited a mosque. She never met with a cleric or studied anything on which to base her (very flimsy) knowledge of Islam. Depending on how small a town a convert might come from, some had never spoken to a Muslim in real life before being recruited by a jihadi group.

Finally, by examining cases of female jihadi terrorists, we can appreciate how and why untrained converts make rookie mistakes that bring them to the attention of authorities (and get them arrested) that professionalized terrorists might not have made. Individuals radicalized online lack the basic skills and tradecraft that terrorists receive in training camps in Libya or Afghanistan. Like “lone actors,” untrained extremists engage in leaking information, boasting, or revealing details of the plot to friends or family. They make amateurish mistakes such as neglecting to use virtual private networks or using their real name instead of an alias in financial transactions. Self-radicalized individuals may lack the acumen to spot undercover agents or informants. As the conspiracy to kill Lars Vilks unfolded, LaRose and her co-conspirators botched virtually every assignment given to them by their handlers. LaRose eventually contacted the FBI to turn herself in, while Ramirez was arrested in Ireland after six months of surveillance by the Gardaí, the Irish national police. Sloppy mistakes are how plots are uncovered and attacks preempted. In the cases of Ramirez and Giampietro, their mistakes led to their arrest and ensured that their plots failed.³⁹

The gender dimensions of jihad have changed since the 1990s. Groups that formerly eschewed women’s involvement (for example, the Taliban) appear to have accepted women into the fold, and some have even engaged them on the front lines. The Taliban were the last holdout to deploy women bombers, albeit sporadically. For instance, in September 2012, the Taliban used a female suicide bomber to attack people waiting in line for food aid in Pakistan.⁴⁰ Their reluctance reflected the Taliban’s hyper-segregation and the second-class status of women in their society. Despite the increasingly regressive role of women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, in 2008 Sheikh Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan, appealed to women on the website Al-Ekhlaas to join the holy war, even though the Taliban repudiated the idea of women’s participation.⁴¹

Taliban leaders suggested that women might be allowed to engage in a martyrdom brigade. In May 2022, in a statement printed by the Khaama news agency of Afghanistan, Zabiullah Mujahid, chief spokesperson of the Taliban, said that the Taliban planned to create a suicide battalion that would be part of the Badri Corps and would be “active under [the] Defense Ministry.” Mujahid suggested that female suicide bombers “will be recruited [to the unit] based on need.”⁴² Even while the Taliban pushed women’s rights back two decades, they nevertheless suggested that women might make good bombers. As women’s rights plummet in Afghanistan, we do not know how resistance to the Taliban might take shape and whether women will use violence in the future. What is clear is that the situation of Afghan women has regressed, offering a shameful example of how extremism and misogyny are intertwined.

A lesser-known jihadi group, the Baluchistan Liberation Army, burst onto the world stage by deploying female suicide bombers in April 2022 in Pakistan. The attack targeting a bus carrying Chinese citizens, captured on CCTV, showed a nondescript veiled woman, facing away from oncoming traffic, detonating the explosive-laden bag she was holding. As Al Jazeera described the scene: “Shari Baloch, a 31-year-old mother of two, instantly [disappeared] in a ball of flame that ripped through the minibus. Four passengers were killed, including three Chinese citizens who were on the way to [teach] Chinese at the University of Karachi’s Confucius Institute.”⁴³

Even a Saudi woman, Nada Al-Qahtani, reportedly traveled to Syria in 2013 to be a suicide bomber, although officially her stated purpose was to lead an all-female ISIS morality police, the Khansa’a Brigade.⁴⁴ Not only did Al-Qahtani travel to Syria without a mahrim (male chaperone), in violation of Saudi law, but also her supporters insisted that she possessed “courage that many men lack.”⁴⁵ As we have seen, one of the primary goals for women’s involvement is to shame men.

Since 2014, women have been increasingly involved in African jihadi groups such as Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya as well as Boko Haram in Nigeria.⁴⁶ According to a report, female members in Kenya’s coastal and northeastern counties were actively involved in non-combative roles such as recruiting, gathering intelligence, facilitating funding, radicalizing their children, and providing the invisible support structure for violent extremists, such as supplying food, shelter and medical care for fighters.⁴⁷ In comparison to their involvement with ISIS, which was in mostly a domestic capacity, women and girls in the African jihadi groups have functioned as recruiters, planners, financial conduits, and spies. In some cases, women might even be masterminds behind terrorist attacks or conveners of terror cells.⁴⁸