The Question of a Woman’s “Obligation” for Jihad

After 9/11, Islamic religious authorities debated the precise nature of women’s involvement in political violence and argued over their obligation to carry out the lesser jihad. It is important to differentiate the two types of jihad, since media sources tend to conflate and misinterpret what jihad means for most Muslims. According to tradition, when the Prophet Muhammad returned from battle, he told his followers, “We return from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”³⁹ The primary or greater jihad is a personal struggle (from the root jahada) to be a good person, pray five times a day, pay alms, fast during Ramadan, and avoid forbidden foods like alcohol and pork. The greater jihad is the more difficult and more important struggle against selfishness, greed, and evil. The lesser jihad is the one most people associate with the term, which is a struggle against injustice when Muslim lands are threatened. This is also the source of journalistic confusion when polls show public support for jihad among Muslims. The reason why so many Muslims reportedly support jihad is that they are thinking about the greater and not the lesser, “holy war” version of the two.⁴⁰

According to the strictest interpretation of jihadi ideology, a woman’s place is in the home and not on the battlefield. Yet the belief that women could be equal to men in the execution of jihad gained traction among religious ideologues in both the Sunni and Shi’a traditions. Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, the former leader of Hizbullah until his death in 2010, emphasized that jihad, though “not obligatory for women,” was permitted to them in the context of a defensive war, where all members of a society are required in battle. Furthermore, he accepted martyrdom operations conducted by women.⁴¹ The question whether women have an equal obligation to defend Muslim lands remains a hotly debated issue among both advocates and detractors of women’s militancy. The split between ISIS and al Qaeda is reflected in the permissibility of female participation in armed jihad.⁴² Several prominent Islamic scholars have joined this debate, arguing that women’s obligation for jihad is equal to that of men.

The leading Sunni religious authorities from Al-Azhar University in Egypt maintain that jihad is not obligatory for women, but it may be executed under three conditions: first, if the enemy invades Muslim lands (defensive jihad); second, if Muslim leaders (i.e., men) call upon the entire umma (community of believers) to engage in jihad; and third, if Muslim leaders appoint women to carry out certain tasks, such as monitoring the enemy or placing land mines, which might require women to enter public spaces in which combat operations are taking place. Under such conditions, women must carry out the duty entrusted to them.⁴³

While Al Qaeda in Iraq acknowledged its female bombers (though not always by name), Abdullah Azzam was one of the earliest al Qaeda ideologues to insist that there was no place for women in the group’s jihad. Azzam’s perspective was strictly traditional: war was a male affair, and women could participate in jihad only if there was a dire need, and only provided they would not be captured. The concern about protecting women’s chastity and reputation meant that ideologues were worried about the consequences of women being seized on the battlefield.

In Defense of the Muslim Lands, Azzam argued that defensive jihad (the lesser jihad) was an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) when Muslim lands were under attack. Under such conditions, a wife could participate “without the permission of her husband.” In his 1985 treatise “Ilhaq bil-qawafilah” (Join the Caravan), Azzam argued that women had a duty to carry out what would be considered a defensive jihad (that is, if the Land of Islam, Dar al-Islam, was under attack), but women’s roles were limited to nursing, teaching, and assisting refugees. He further insisted that women must always be accompanied by a male guardian (mahrim). Azzam was unwilling to grant women explicit permission to fight.⁴⁴

Women’s jihad cannot involve direct combat or fighting. Azzam explained: “All this is to honour the woman and protect her, to give her time to educate generations and create heroes. So, the roles of men and women are complementary and without this balance, life will be spoiled. Allah knows best.”⁴⁵ In al Qaeda and Taliban military training camps in Afghanistan, women were physically separated from their husbands and told to care for the children. This allowed men to dedicate their lives wholly to jihad. Women could contribute by supporting the men, helping them to endure the hardships associated with the frequent moves and the difficult terrain and living conditions, and raising their children to follow in their fathers’ footsteps.

Thus women were restricted to providing logistical support, tending the wounded, and supporting the men. Not every jihadi wife was able to “stand by her man.” While on the run from aerial bombardment and global pariah status, Osama bin Laden’s first wife, Najwa Ghanem, had severe difficulty acclimating to a spartan existence in Afghanistan and eventually left him in 2001, taking their children with her.⁴⁶

Yūsuf al-’Uyairī posted a treatise titled “The Role of Women in Fighting the Enemies,” in which he encouraged women to take an active and enabling role in jihad.⁴⁷ The Egyptian-born theologian Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi insisted that women, like men, could even be suicide bombers.⁴⁸ In an interview in 1995, al Qaeda patron and ally Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi (former leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, and an early sponsor of Osama bin Laden who provided him safe haven from 1990 to 1996), advocated for women’s equality in his treatise on women’s rights. Addressing the question of women’s position in jihad, Turabi wrote: “At the time of the Prophet, women fought alongside with him, and oversaw the logistics and medical services. There were even female Companions [sahaba] who were dispatched overseas to wage jihad and die as martyrs.”⁴⁹

Many al Qaeda leaders resisted Sheikh Fadlallah’s interpretation of women’s equal obligation in jihad, for as a Shi’a leader and Grand Ayatollah, he lacked the same religious authority and credibility among Sunni Muslims. But the Egyptian Qaradawi’s position (on women and other matters) reflects what might be considered a more centrist interpretation (wasatiyya). For Qaradawi, jihad must keep pace with new technologies and adapt to a modern world. In his book Fiqh al Jihad (The Jurisprudence of Jihad), he refers to “jihad of the age,” which includes disseminating jihad through powerful media weapons such as TV, the Internet, email, and so on instead of relying exclusively on guns. Qaradawi also called for a more prominent role for women in jihad. In 2009 he suggested: “Persuading Muslims of the message of Islam and the importance of this jihad in the path of God should be the priority. In this respect, the role of women in the service of Islam is not inferior to that of men, since she is equally responsible.”⁵⁰

The Palestinian cleric and member of parliament Yunus al-Astal traced the lineage of women’s participation in jihad to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. In 2007 he pointed to how Umm Umara Al-Ansaria had fought at the Battle of Uhud (625 AD). She was wounded thirteen times and lost her hand for the cause. On Al-Rafidain television, Astal doubled down on this position, arguing: “When jihad becomes an individual duty [fard ‘ayn] it is also the duty of women. Women should participate if the Islamic Army was weakening and the enemy was gaining the upper hand.”⁵¹ Palestinian women appeared to agree with Astal. Huda Naim, a prominent women’s leader in Gaza, insisted, “We don’t have a special militant wing for women … but that doesn’t mean that we strip women of the right to go to jihad.”⁵² As women were increasingly perceived to have an equal obligation to engage in jihad, religious organizations reevaluated women’s participation in militant groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and it naturally followed that the global jihadi groups followed suit. The dissemination of radical ideologies online pulled women in as recruiters and propagandists for al Qaeda and affiliated groups. But it was an al Qaeda–affiliated regional group that first “green-lit” female suicide bombers for the organization and set the tone for a decade of militant jihadi women.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a barely literate Bedouin, had been unknown outside Jordan prior to being catapulted onto the world stage by General Colin Powell. In Powell’s February 5, 2003, address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, he identified Zarqawi as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.⁵³ Zarqawi involved women in the jihad in concrete ways and, in 2005, directed a statement to women in Iraq: “This message is to the free women of Mesopotamia in particular, and the women of the Muslim Ummah in general. Where are you in this holy jihad? Do you not fear God? Do you raise your children to be slaughtered by tyrants? Have you accepted submissiveness and shunned jihad?”⁵⁴ It is unclear whether Zarqawi advocated for women because he believed they were useful or because he genuinely believed they had an equal obligation for jihad as the men. Zarqawi had a complex relationship to women and could be described as a mama’s boy. One journalist noted, “Al-Zarqawi’s mother, Omm Sayel, whom he adored—and who had traveled to Peshawar with him when he joined the jihad—died of leukemia in 2004; although he was the most wanted man in Jordan at the time of her death, al-Zarqawi returned [to Jordan] to attend her funeral.”⁵⁵

Not long after Zarqawi’s public message, Muriel Degauque detonated her improvised explosive device (IED) targeting a US military convoy in the town of Baquba, south of Baghdad, on November 9, 2005. Muriel and her husband, Issam Goris, had driven across Turkey and Syria into Iraq with the goal of killing as many American soldiers as possible.⁵⁶ Issam, wearing a bulletproof vest packed with fifteen pounds of explosives, failed in his mission; he was shot in the chest before he could discharge the device. Degauque was the sole person killed in the suicide attack, although she wounded an American soldier. That same day, Sajida Atrous al-Rishawi tried to blow herself up at a hotel wedding reception at the Radisson Amman in Jordan but was apprehended by Jordanian police when her bomb failed to detonate. For Sajida, terrorism was a family business. Her brother was a top commander of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In fact, several of Sajida’s brothers had been killed fighting American coalition troops in Iraq. In her grief, Sajida was vulnerable. She volunteered for a suicide mission after a marriage of convenience was arranged to provide a plausible cover for travel and a chaperone (mahrim) for the journey.

In Degauque’s case, she was the one who persuaded her husband to carry out the operation, urging him to protect and defend the sisters in Islam. The manipulation of traditional gender roles has a powerful effect on male sensibilities, instigating feelings of obligation.

Sajida al-Rishawi remained in custody for ten years until ISIS threatened to kill a Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh, unless she was released in a prisoner swap for Kasasbeh and another hostage, the Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.⁵⁷ The law professor Karima Bennoune said in an NBC News report: “[The] family and organizational links may indeed be significant in the call to free al-Rishawi… . However, it is also likely that ISIS has sought to switch its ransom demands for propaganda purposes, to position itself—wrongly—as a defender of Muslim women.” Bennoune cited an ISIS video that referred to al-Rishawi as its “imprisoned sister.”⁵⁸

Kasasbeh had been captured on December 24, 2014, after his jet crashed in northeastern Syria near Raqqa during a bombing mission against Islamic State forces. Supporters of Kasasbeh rallied outside the royal palace in Amman, and his brother pressured the government to comply.⁵⁹ The Jordanian government declared on state television its willingness to meet ISIS’s demands for Kasasbeh’s release even after Goto had been beheaded.⁶⁰ Before the swap could take place, however, ISIS videotaped the pilot’s immolation and posted it to their social media channels on Telegram. In retaliation, Jordan ordered al-Rishawi’s immediate execution.⁶¹

In a different affiliate, Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, encouraged his followers to set up websites focused on the plight of Muslims, amplify the exploits of the mujahideen (holy warriors), provide a venue for graphic propaganda videos, and post this material to various social networking sites.⁶² Anwar al-Awlaki addressed women’s involvement in jihadi activities and penned a treatise encouraging it. By 2005, more and more women heeded the siren’s call to support extremism (like Colleen LaRose) and participate in militant activities (for example, when a British student, Roshonara Choudhry, stabbed a member of parliament, Stephen Timms).⁶³

The Islamic Army in Iraq posted a communiqué, “This Is How Women Should Be,” which noted that a Muslim woman should “be ready for any service the mujahedeen need from her.” Yet the leader of al Qaeda at the time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had advised against women traveling to a war zone like Afghanistan without a male chaperone. Zawahiri emphatically insisted that there were no women in al Qaeda’s ranks.

Zawahiri acknowledged that women played a role in the other areas of the Dar al-Harb (House of War) and in the global jihad. In Algeria, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb used women in bombing campaigns, as evidenced in the March 2012 attack at Tamanrasset. In Sudan, women marched and performed military maneuvers. In Somalia, some women have become martyrs for actions such as the April 2012 attack on the Somali National Theater.⁶⁴

The jihadi groups occasionally opened their discussion boards to field questions from (and to provide clarification for) their female supporters worldwide. In 2008, at the height of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s suicide bombing campaign, a female supporter asked Zawahiri whether she should participate in jihad in the Maghreb.

Zawahiri responded by stating that while jihad was a universal obligation for men and women, if joining the jihad meant a woman would have to abandon her children, then she should not do it. Ironically, the ISIS magazine Inspire featured a photo of an empty crib to celebrate, albeit indirectly, Tafsheen Malik, perpetrator of the San Bernardino Christmas party attack.⁶⁵ Online, female supporters pleaded with Zawahiri for the right to be more involved. One woman, who had listened ten times to his speech against women’s direct engagement in battle, wrote to him: “How many times have I wished I were a man…. When Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri said there are no women in Al Qaeda, he saddened and hurt me. I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest… . I am powerless.”⁶⁶ For women, Zawahiri’s response came as a shock and a disappointment.

The ideological split over which activities could be undertaken by women is one of the fault lines within al Qaeda and among its affiliates that continues today. To further muddy the waters, one of Zawahiri’s four wives, Umayma Hasan, published an “open letter to my sisters in Islam” in 2010 identifying three types of Muslim women: female jihadis, sisters in Islam who had been imprisoned, and the rest. Hasan called on the female jihadis to remain steadfast (sumud) in the path of jihad, as “victory is near!” God, Hasan assured women, “is not about to forsake them, and they shall either be rewarded with victory or martyrdom,” adding, “Each is sweeter than the other.” She argued, “Jihad is an individual duty [fard ‘ayn] incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman.” Basically, Hasan called on women to participate in jihad while her husband dismissed the possibility of any women’s participation. She acknowledged that the fighting path was not easy for women because it always required a male companion or mahrim to chaperone them. She lauded the sisters who had executed martyrdom operations despite the obstacles against them in places like Palestine, Iraq, and Chechnya, and who “caused the enemy high costs and caused the enemy a big defeat. We ask from Allah to accept them and connect us with them with goodness.”⁶⁷

Hasan recalled the female companions (sahaba) who fought alongside the Prophet Muhammad, many of whom showed greater courage than the men. She observed that the requirement for a mahrim was not a legal constraint, and that the legal doctrine of “defensive jihad” was designed for extraordinary circumstances that relieve women from having to seek anyone’s permission before taking up jihad; the requirement was only a cultural constraint.⁶⁸

Nelly Lahoud of the US Army War College explored the link between women and the defensive (rather than the offensive) jihad and concluded that the most conservative elements of al Qaeda did not support mobilizing women militarily:

The question is not whether the jihadis would or would not condone a military role for women. Rather, the more compelling question is why they have not already called on women to fulfill their individual duty of jihad. This issue has immense implications on the credibility of their jihad: if the battle the jihadis are confronting today does not necessitate women’s participation in jihad, then this raises doubts as to whether they are in fact engaged in a defensive war that they have rallied Muslims worldwide to join. If the jihadis can afford to carry out jihad without the assistance of all Muslims, women included, they undermine their arguments for the urgency and credibility of the jihad they espouse.⁶⁹

Hasan insisted that women were critical for the success of jihad. She rationalized that there are many ways women can fulfill their obligation for jihad: “Put yourselves in the service of the jihadis, carry out what they ask, whether in supporting them financially, serving their [practical] needs, supplying them with information, opinions, partaking in fighting or even [volunteering to carry out] a martyrdom operation.”⁷⁰ She urged Muslim women throughout the world to engage in jihad by observing Islamic law, wearing the veil, and bringing up their children to love jihad.

On the one hand, al Qaeda’s leadership was seemingly on the fence regarding changing its views about women’s roles. On the other hand, the inconsistency between Zawahiri and his wife reflected the need to address a range of constituencies. Zawahiri was aware of the conservative nature of his support base. But he was able to acknowledge and mollify a new (and younger) generation with more practical and even progressive views of women.

The ideological schism over women’s participation in jihad—which emerged in the early 2000s when Umayma appeared to offer women a role in combat and martyrdom operations while her husband insisted that there were no women in al Qaeda—reflected a generational shift within the group as well as differences between the core of the group (called Al Qaeda al Sulba) and its regional affiliates globally. This partially explains the role of women in Jabhat al-Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, whereby they would run onto the battlefield after an attack, rummage through the pockets of the fallen fighters, and confiscate whatever weapons, ammunition, or currency they could. That said, the women in ISIS did not participate in these “cleanup operations,” despite women in Nusra and ISIS being subjected to parallel gendered regulations.⁷¹

Women’s pathways to radicalization were multilayered and complex. These included efforts to make up for periods of their lives when they indulged in the excesses of youth. The onetime pot-smoking Australian beach bunny Rabiah (Robyn) Hutchinson converted and became a radical burqa-clad jihadi. This 180-degree volte-face was not completely atypical if we examine why converts appear to be more radicalized. Hutchinson married multiple jihadi leaders, including Abdul Rahim Ayub, the head of Jamiat Islamiyyah’s mantiqa (division) 3, and the Egyptian Abu Walid al-Masri (Mustafa Hamid), one of the members of al Qaeda’s shura (consultative) council and after eight marriages became known as the “Liz Taylor of terror” or the “grand dame of terror.”⁷² Similarly, many of the female converts who emigrated to join ISIS had a traumatic history of abuse or other negative life experiences prior to their conversion to Islam and radicalization. The leaders of al Qaeda and eventually ISIS, especially a younger generation, recognized that there was a tactical value in having women involved in frontline operations.⁷³ In hopes of evading security measures instituted after 9/11, recruiters sought recent female converts. But the women they especially wanted had blue eyes, blond hair, and foreign passports.

Colleen LaRose: Escaping A Difficult Life

Muriel Degauque and Colleen LaRose embodied a particular type of jihadi recruit, an older but malleable convert to the faith seeking personal significance and a clean slate. LaRose became the stereotypical template for the convert turned radical. She had been the victim of sexual violence—leading to a life of alcohol and drugs, from crack cocaine to crystal methamphetamine—and abided by what her handlers told her.

Degauque detonated her IED in 2005, but LaRose was the first American woman prosecuted for terrorism offenses. Her co-conspirator Jamie Ramirez was arrested in Ireland for conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack. Ali Charaf Damache, an organizer of the conspiracy, who was based in Ireland, was held in an Irish jail until he was indicted by a US court. He pled guilty to providing material support in 2018.⁷⁴

Colleen LaRose and others like her established a new model for targeted recruitment: malleable converts with a checkered past who were Western in appearance. LaRose embodied this new paradigm for leveraging social media to radicalize women who had never set foot in an Afghan or Yemeni training camp.

According to interviews she gave while incarcerated in 2010, after a decade of trauma and substance abuse, Colleen converted to Islam. A victim of incest and rape, and a runaway from the age of thirteen, LaRose had become a sex worker to survive on the streets. The abuse began when she was seven and in the second grade; she and her sister Pam (then eleven) were raped by their father, Richard, who would appear at their bedroom door at night with a bottle of lotion, the signal that molestation was imminent. The abuse continued until she ran away at age thirteen. By fifteen she married one of her “johns,” a man twice her age. Colleen got pregnant and suffered a miscarriage, resulting in her inability to have children in the future. The couple divorced, and she married another abusive spouse. This second marriage was followed by years of substance abuse and a failed suicide attempt in 2005.

LaRose’s radicalization began after an anonymous sexual encounter with someone she described simply as a “Middle Eastern guy” she met in Amsterdam while on vacation with her then live-in boyfriend. Returning to the United States to care for her elderly mother, LaRose became enthralled with news of the Middle East. She spent long hours researching the region online. While chatting with a Saudi man one night, LaRose typed the word Shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith) into her search engine and converted to Islam via instant messenger on Facebook. She recited the statement of the faith—Allah is the one true God and the Prophet Muhammad is his messenger—three times. This was technically all she needed to do to convert. By converting, LaRose exchanged a life of alcohol, crack cocaine, and crystal meth for faith in a higher power: Islam and Allah.

One of the features common to women who become radicalized virtually is their tendency to spend eight to nine hours a day on their computer. Their virtual life overtakes their real-world interactions until they are online more than they are present in real life. LaRose said that she taught herself Islam by spending hours online and visited several Muslim dating sites, like Muslima.com, to meet members of her new community, but she never visited a mosque for formal instruction.

As soon as she converted, LaRose found herself chatting endlessly online with extremists. She began raising money for jihadi causes and posting about the plight of Muslims in the Middle East. She was especially moved by the Palestinians’ cause and the injustices of the Israeli occupation. According to interviews, she considered participating in jihad as a way “to become somebody.”⁷⁵ In the documentary for the Irish TV network RTÉ, Jihad Jane, she told the filmmaker Ciaran Cassidy explicitly, “I was nobody but because I’m a terrorist, I’m [now a] somebody!”⁷⁶

LaRose appeared to be devoted to the men she met online and blindly followed them. She had first become radicalized while chatting with an al Qaeda operative who called himself “Eagle Eye.” During her recruitment for an operation to assassinate Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who had insulted Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad by sketching Muhammad’s face onto the head of a dog, she became emotionally attached to her handlers.⁷⁷ LaRose explained: “I talked to them so much online I just felt they were strong brothers and they were very religious. I felt love for them. I loved my brothers so much, when they told me something I would listen to them no matter what.”⁷⁸ To reporters she claimed: “I just loved my brothers … when they would tell me stuff, I would listen to them, no matter what… . I also was … lost.”⁷⁹

LaRose’s story illustrates the transition from online radicalization to real-life jihad. The combination of exposure to graphic and violent images and the prodding by her online community of “brothers” reinforced the idea that she needed to do something. On social media Colleen posted that she was willing to die a martyr. She recalled:

I was watching videos on YouTube. The thing that had an effect on me was the brutality I was seeing against the Muslims. I would get upset. The blood and the bodies and the children. The day that I was watching the Zionists bombing the Palestinians, you could hear the children screaming and crying and all the women and the brothers. At the same time I was watching this on the internet, outside my window I could hear kids playing and laughing in the streets. And I was thinking to myself, Nobody knows what’s going on.⁸⁰

“Eagle Eye” instructed Colleen to go to Sweden and kill Vilks in August 2009. Not long after she boarded a plane to Ireland, she was told to coordinate plans with the Algerian Damache, code-named “theblackflag,” and an American teenager named Mohammed Hassan Khalid. From the perspective of al Qaeda, LaRose was an ideal recruit. She looked like a typical American woman—blond hair, pale skin—and best of all, she possessed a US passport. As a British journalist noted, “Even her Texas twang, would help her to get close enough to the target.”⁸¹

One mistake quickly followed another. Not only did LaRose fail in her mission to kill Vilks, but also she ended up turning herself in to the FBI. The judge in her case considered her crimes to be “gravely serious” and added, “The court has no doubt that, given the opportunity, Ms. LaRose would have completed the mission.” Colleen apologized for blindly following her handlers. She claimed that she had been in a trance “and I couldn’t see anything else. I don’t want to be in jihad no more.”⁸²

She was released from prison after serving eight years of a ten-year sentence.⁸³ She emerged in 2018, still veiled and religious and now a Trump supporter.

Malika el-Aroud: Holy Warrior for the Twenty-First Century

One of the women I profiled in Bombshell, the Belgian jihadist Malika el-Aroud, was in jail at the time of publication in 2011 but has since died, on April 6, 2023. El-Aroud was one of al Qaeda’s most prolific propagandists and was considered the “First Lady of Jihad.” According to a profile in New Lines Magazine: “She was one of the earliest keyboard warriors, who harnessed the power of the internet, sending men and women to their deaths in the cause of jihad, shedding much blood both at home and abroad. This was long before the media’s fascination with Jihadi Janes, White Widows, Lady al Qaeda or Bethnal Green girls running off to join the Islamic State.”⁸⁴

In May 2010 the fifty-four-year-old received an eight-year sentence for terrorist activities. A Brussels court sentenced her to prison plus a €5,000 fine for establishing, leading, and financing a terrorist group. The court found that el-Aroud had demonstrated “reckless disregard” for the deaths of young European men who went to Afghanistan and Iraq to engage in jihad at her urging. In private, one investigator confided in me, “We knew she would eventually make a mistake, and this time, this time, we finally had her.”⁸⁵ After years of suspicion, placing her under house arrest, and subjecting her to consecutive investigations by the secret police, Belgian officials apprehended el-Aroud on the technical charge of contributing to the deaths of French and Belgian citizens. Like Al Capone, finally indicted for tax evasion, Malika el-Aroud was charged on a technicality: for endangerment.

El-Aroud was a typical revert, someone who had been born Muslim but had not lived an especially pious life, then returned to the faith as a kind of born-again Muslim. In 1991, when el-Aroud was thirty-two, her life was dreadful; she was a single mother after a string of failed relationships had left her suicidal and psychologically vulnerable. She rediscovered Islam and became a radical missionary proselytizing for the jihadi cause. Malika’s journey to jihad might have been a reaction to the excesses of her youth. She gravitated to the Centre Islamique Belge in Saint-Jans-Molenbeek, founded in 1997 by the radical Syrian cleric Ayachi Bassam.⁸⁶ The Centre was a breeding ground for extremism for Sheikh Bassam, who indoctrinated all his followers with a particularly violent Salafi interpretation of Islam.⁸⁷ El-Aroud married and divorced twice before meeting her third husband, Abdessater Dahmane. According to Paul Cruickshank of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, el-Aroud was impressed by the darkened prayer callus on Dahmane’s forehead, implying that he was a man of deep faith and devotion. After a brief courtship, they wed in 1999; Sheikh Bassam officiated at the ceremony.⁸⁸ According to the New Lines profile: “Shortly after the wedding, Dahmane left for the al Qaeda training camps of Afghanistan. In 2001, Aroud followed him. She was a housewife in Jalalabad, a town that had endured decades of war, first the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979–89 and then a bloody civil war in which the Mujahideen factions fought each other for power.”⁸⁹

By the early 2000s, el-Aroud’s website, Minbar-sos.com, offered a seminal example of how women capitalized on gender norms to goad men into participating in jihad, supposedly to protect their Muslim sisters. At her trial, el-Aroud was accused of using the Internet to lure vulnerable Web surfers and indoctrinate and recruit them for jihadist activities. Her website received 1,500 hits a day.⁹⁰

El-Aroud, aka Oum Obeyda, was typical of the women al Qaeda used to recruit men. The women echoed al Qaeda’s dyadic view in which the “World of Islam” (Dar al-Islam) was pitted in a galactic struggle against the “World of War” (Dar al-Harb). El-Aroud, like Colleen LaRose and Muriel Degauque, was radicalized by consuming online materials.⁹¹ She and her first husband, Abdessater, watched videos of Osama bin Laden’s fiery speeches which inspired many to join the jihad, and listened to his taped sermons. They felt as if “Osama were talking directly to them through the computer—instigating them to act.”⁹²

On September 9, 2001, in an operation that foreshadowed 9/11, el-Aroud’s husband assassinated the Taliban’s rival Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan. Massoud was the leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance. Masquerading as journalists and members of a camera crew, the assassins secured an interview with Massoud, the so-called Lion of Panjir, two days before 9/11 and camouflaged the suicide bomb in their camera equipment. On September 12, el-Aroud learned of her husband’s death when she stepped out of her house and someone congratulated her on being the wife of a martyr. Although el-Aroud was arrested for complicity in Massoud’s death, she persuaded the court at the time that she was ignorant of her husband’s actions despite having received $500 in cash and a personal letter of congratulations from Osama bin Laden after the suicide attack. Indeed, investigations leading up to her 2010 trial showed that el-Aroud had known about the attack all along and certainly well before September 12, 2001.⁹³ She had returned to Belgium a few weeks prior to pick up her husband’s laptop and to deliver medicine, as well as two envelopes full of cash to cover the costs of the operation. Belgian authorities hoped that if they dropped the charge against her of accessory to murder, el-Aroud might become a valuable confidential informant; she turned out, however, to be the opposite—a double agent.

Once acquitted of conspiring in Massoud’s assassination, el-Aroud was propelled to fame and jihadi stardom as the “martyr’s wife.” One jihadi website, the Voice of the Oppressed, described her as a “female holy warrior for the 21st century.” Her status as the wife of a shahid (martyr) provided her both the bona fides and the contacts with which to launch a new career in online jihad. El-Aroud became a role model for jihadi women everywhere.⁹⁴

El-Aroud remarried a Moroccan man several years her junior, Moaz Garsallaoui, whom she met online in a jihadi chat room. They moved to a small Swiss village, where they ran four pro–al Qaeda French-language websites that carried the unabridged speeches of Osama bin Laden and the terror “snuff videos” of Zarqawi’s hostage beheadings.⁹⁵ El-Aroud posted on her website, “God willing, I wait for Afghanistan to be purified of those pigs’ stains so that I may someday again return and join Garsallaoui in jihad.”⁹⁶ She did not believe that it was a woman’s duty to set off bombs or to participate in a suicide attack, yet as a woman she had a potent weapon at her disposal—her pen (or laptop), which proved mightier than any sword. Her self-described mission was “to write, to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”⁹⁷

El-Aroud conceded that she did more than report on the events of the war. She urged her readers to travel to the conflict zones and encouraged women to support the men in jihad. For el-Aroud, it was important that women participate in the struggle.

On November 9, 2005, Muriel Degauque, a convert to Islam, did just that. Degauque rammed her explosives-laden Kia into a US military convoy in Baquba, Iraq (the capital of Diyala province), thereby becoming the first female suicide bomber for Al Qaeda in Iraq. In support of this action, el-Aroud posted, “There are men who don’t speak out because they are afraid.”⁹⁸ The theme of el-Aroud’s posts was shaped by Degauque’s “martyrdom operation.” When she began to highlight that it was Degauque, a woman, who had done something that men should be doing, el-Aroud implied that Muslim men were being derelict in their masculine duties and responsibilities when they allowed women to fight in their stead. Addressing women, el-Aroud demanded, “Stop sleeping and open your eyes.”⁹⁹ Her mantra reiterated that it was better to die than to live in humiliation.¹⁰⁰

Bernard Bertossa, the Swiss judge at her trial [for terrorist activities], said that [Malika] exploited the right to freedom of expression and peddled propaganda… . Her words had a way of finding themselves on the bookshelves of radical jihadis all over the Francophone world, in the same way Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” might find its way onto the bookshelves of the far right.¹⁰¹

During court testimony, el-Aroud argued that the West and Israel inflicted suffering on Muslims worldwide. This suffering was inspiration for jihad.¹⁰² For el-Aroud, resistance against the Zionist occupation of Palestine was an Islamic obligation equal to any religious obligation, such as praying five times a day, giving charity, and fasting during Ramadan. For el-Aroud, remaining silent was cowardice. Her arguments were consistent with the findings of the Middle East Institute’s Robyn Torok that “oppression against Muslims and the promotion of grievances was perhaps the most significant theme found on the Islamic group [Web] page…. Posts included graphic photos of victims including children, many YouTube videos and news stories of war crimes or abuses.”¹⁰³

El-Aroud’s propaganda promoted suicide terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan and supported domestic terror cells throughout Europe. By 2015, the radicalization problem in her hometown of Molenbeek made it a center for ISIS operations. Counterterrorism officials recognized el-Aroud’s continued influence. According to Claude Moniquet, a European counterterrorism expert: “Malika was a role model, an icon who’s bold. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She’s very clever—and extremely dangerous.”¹⁰⁴ In response to el-Aroud’s recurring arrests, her husband Garsallaoui posted a message to the authorities in May 2009: “If you thought that you could pressure me to slow down through the arrest of my wife, you were wrong. It won’t stop me fulfilling my objectives … the place of my wife in my heart and the heart of all mujahideen is greater than ever.”¹⁰⁵ El-Aroud’s influence extended beyond her website. Her book Les Soldats de Lumière (The Soldiers of Light) was regularly found in the homes of French ISIS terrorists, including the Charlie Hebdo attacker Cherif Kouachi and Hayat Boumeddiene, discussed in greater detail later in this book.¹⁰⁶

The major difference between al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s recruitment tactics appears to be in the way they leveraged social media. El-Aroud urged young men to join the jihad as soldiers of Allah, whereas ISIS created a proto-state and solicited entire families to join. Female recruiters targeted men, women, and underage girls. The idea was that men should bring along their family. The goal was not a few years fighting abroad but rather emigration—to build a new utopian Muslim society.

Another difference was the location of the recruitment. Al Qaeda had an army of female online warriors like el-Aroud who used their gender to shame men into traveling to Iraq or Afghanistan from European cities.¹⁰⁷ In contrast, ISIS relied on recruiters who resided in their so-called caliphate and worked across multiple languages to recruit men and women from their home countries.

On her website, el-Aroud expressed her admiration for Muriel Degauque. Degauque (whom el-Aroud called “Maryam”) “had the courage to go to Iraq and kill Americans when men failed in their duty to do so.”¹⁰⁸ As with so many other terrorist groups, part of the logic behind women’s participation is to shame men for sitting idly by when jihad is imperative.

Meanwhile, Muslim women in Western countries are told that their brothers are dying in battle to defend their honor against Western men who would “defile” them.¹⁰⁹ The trope of “our sisters in Islam,” vulnerable to attack by infidel soldiers, accounts for a significant volume of the Internet rhetoric challenging Muslim men to join the jihad. It is precisely this challenge—that the men have failed in their masculine duty to protect Muslim women—that has shamed many Western Muslims into joining the global jihad and going to Iraq or Afghanistan to fight.

SOS: Save Our Sisters

Women’s efficacy as recruiters is linked to their successful manipulation of societal norms. They do this by deploying a construction of masculinity within traditional patriarchal settings. Female online recruiters manipulate gender norms and the social stigma associated with deviating from those norms (for instance, not being thought of as “manly”). Taunting men for not doing their manly duty (according to traditional gender norms) is a powerful provocation.¹¹⁰ In honor-bound societies, when women imply that men are unmanly, this challenges their honor by questioning their ability to protect and defend the family. In some interpretations, unmanly men not only fail to live up to the standards of masculinity but also may be considered effeminate.¹¹¹ This tactic of de-masculinization (or feminization) charges that “unmanly men” have failed in their societal role.¹¹² For the gender studies scholar V. G. Julie Rajan: “The women recruiters act in ways that support traditional feminine social roles of wife and mother. The wife demands that her husband rise to his masculine authority in the home and community by defending the family and the community. As the mother, the woman recruiter is nurturing her nation, protecting it by speaking in its defense, but she is also reinforcing the male patriarchy.”¹¹³

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (also known as Dr. Fadl), one of the original founders of al Qaeda, elaborated on men’s lack of murwa (manliness), a powerful pre-Islamic Arabic cultural virtue. Manliness could be demonstrated only through a man’s acts of bravery, resilience, and courage in addressing the slights and wrongdoings perpetrated against his family or his community. Fadl argued that Muslims had grown accustomed to loving life and hating death, and therefore they had abandoned jihad and ceased to be “real” men.¹¹⁴

By challenging or questioning men’s masculinity, Fadl was attempting to taunt and goad men into action. Accusing men of hiding behind women or allowing women to do their job became the clarion call to men to participate more actively in jihad.¹¹⁵ Many al Qaeda websites (obviously designed by men) posted pictures of women brandishing weapons or cartoons of mujahidats (female fighters) to suggest that women were taking up the cause of jihad because men had failed to do so.¹¹⁶

Gender is used to lure male jihadis in two ways: by offering women to men as rewards and by feminizing men who refuse to join. The message is that the failure to participate in the jihad results in sexual trespass against Muslim women. Men need to step up to protect their “sisters in Islam.”

Goading men to fight for the jihad by questioning their masculinity is neither new nor unique to al Qaeda, ISIS, or contemporary patriarchal terrorist groups. This challenge to men dates back over one hundred years. Joshua Goldstein traced its history in his 2001 award-winning book War and Gender.¹¹⁷ After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the new Ministry of War created a “Battalion of Death” composed of several hundred Russian women. The government used images of the militant women to shame men into action. A photo of the brigade was captioned accordingly “Shame.” Goldstein explains:

Botchkareva [a Russian woman involved in the Battalion of Death] argued that “numbers were immaterial, that what was important was to shame the men and that a few women at one place could serve as an example to the entire front… . [T]he purpose of the plan would be to shame the men in the trenches by having the women go over the top first.” The battalion was thus exceptional and was essentially a propaganda tool. As such it was heavily publicized… . [The photo captioned “Shame”] topped big posters pasted all over the city.” [An observer] wrote in 1918: “No other feature of the great war ever caught the public fancy like the Death Battalion, composed of Russian women.”¹¹⁸

Related propaganda throughout western Europe was designed to motivate men to fight in the Great War. In an Irish poster archived at the Linen Hall in Belfast, an Irish woman is depicted in the fields, hands on hips, asking a man, “Will you go fight, or shall I?” These posters were intended to shame Irish men to join the Triple Entente.¹¹⁹

During the war, women would publicly distribute white feathers to civilian men as symbols of cowardice to remind them of their duty. In 1914 Vice Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald organized a group of thirty women called the Order of the White Feather in Folkestone, England, to hand white feathers to men not in uniform. This tactic was widely reported in the British press and rapidly spread to other countries (and was even depicted in an episode of Downton Abbey).¹²⁰ Men were so daunted by the prospect of being presented with a feather that even veterans feared they might be mistaken for a draft dodger (to use a later term). It is one of the reasons why the US military issued a coin men could display to show women that they had honorably served. One army commander joked with me that this was the original “challenge coin.”

The French terrorist Mohammed Merah, who was responsible for a March 2012 killing spree in Toulouse and Montauban, France, posted a message on the website Forsane Alizza (Knights of Glory) that called for more soldiers to defend Muslim women.¹²¹ Abu Musab al-Zarqawi also sought to shame men who had not yet taken up jihad by calling on Muslim women to enter the battlefield. In one of his missives, Zarqawi declared: “War has broken out… . [I]f you [Muslim men] are not going to be chivalrous knights in this war [fursan al-harb], make way for women to wage it… . Yes, by God, men have lost their manhood!”¹²² In another communiqué Zarqawi rhetorically asked Muslim men: “Has the honor of your women become so trivial in your eyes? Beware. Have you not heard that many of your chaste and pure sisters from among the Sunnis of Tel’afar had their honor desecrated, their chastity slaughtered, and their wombs filled with the sperm of the Crusaders and their brothers? Where is your religion? Moreover, where is your sense of honor, your zeal, and your manliness?”¹²³

In other words, Muslim men would be judged unmanly if they refused the dawa (call) to fight. Amplifying men’s presumed duty to protect women, jihadi propaganda increasingly demanded that men guard women’s chastity and honor from outrages by Western men. The association between Muslim women’s virtue and terrorist mobilization translated into the threat that if a man refused to fight, this explicitly meant that women in his family or the larger religious community would be sexually assaulted because of his cowardice. For two decades, jihadi online propaganda accused US soldiers and NATO troops of sexual improprieties against Muslim women.¹²⁴ ISIS adopted this tactic of shaming men by reprimanding those who failed to take up arms. In “A Message from East Africa” in the ISIS magazine Rumiyah, propagandists asked:

The Sunnah of the Prophet directed its incitement for physical combat towards the men of the Ummah. Why, then, do so many men continue to neglect their duty? Why have they laid down their swords and armed themselves instead with one excuse after another for not fulfilling their obligation? … And why have they sat back idly—if not cowardly—while the Ummah’s chaste, noble women, for whom jihad is a voluntary and righteous deed, stood in all their bravery to fulfil the duty of men?¹²⁵

American and British Women of ISIS

An unofficial video from ISIS’s al-Khansa’a Brigade featured Sally Jones, a British ex–punk rocker and widow of hacker Junaid Hussain. Before her death, Jones made the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, although she was not actually a formal member of the brigade, which was mostly populated by local women and girls who could communicate in Arabic. Jones, who went by the kunya (nom de guerre) Umm Hussein al Britani, was killed in June 2017 during an American drone strike in Syria. Jones made the brigade infamous.¹²⁶ She was the mother of ISIS executioner Abu Abdullah al Britani, known by his family in the UK as JoJo. JoJo made international headlines when, on May 26, 2016, at the age of thirteen, he stood with four other ISIS “Cubs of the Caliphate,” children indoctrinated by the Islamic State, and executed a Kurdish prisoner by shooting him in the head.¹²⁷ The executions were taped and disseminated on ISIS social media platforms with JoJo beaming for the camera.

ISIS preyed on curious young people using secure platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Tumblr, Telegram, and Kik, where members exchanged verses from the Qur’an, posted propaganda videos and speeches by English- and Arabic-speaking radical preachers, distributed news about the Islamic State, and, critically, showered new recruits with virtual friendship and support. Inevitably, being teenagers, they conversed in an amalgamation of jihadi-cool patois, using slang or emojis mixed with Islamic phrases, even though most of the foreign women recruited did not speak Arabic. The Guardian journalist Nabeelah Jaffer corroborated this in her interviews with girls who had joined ISIS: “They started by chatting on Twitter and Ask.fm, then moved to encrypted messaging apps such as Kik, Surespot and Telegram. Paranoia runs through most of the online interactions—no one’s identity is clear, and anyone could be bluffing. But the hint of danger was part of the glamour.” One of the girls “thought she was being careful. She was in her late teens and had recently graduated from high school, where she had been a lonely girl interested in Star Trek and computer programming.”¹²⁸

Some of the most ardent female supporters—like the ISIS recruiter Umm Ubaydah and her friends Aqsa Mahmood, known as Umm Layth, and Umm Haritha, a Canadian immigrant whose nickname was @bintladen—traveled to Raqqa, the center of ISIS’s operations in Syria, in search of a soul mate and encouraged other women to follow suit. The women thought that by joining ISIS and participating in the jihad, they would secure their place in paradise. The women also believed that merely by being in Syria, they were participating in the construction of a utopian society, something as important as the promise of empowerment and piety. For the Islamic State propaganda, when Western women emigrated, it was a marketing coup. Their arrival was heralded at Friday prayers and announced on Al Bayan, the Islamic State’s radio station, because it legitimated the caliphate’s existence.

At the height of its power in 2015–16, ISIS identified susceptible young women living in the West and relied heavily on its own ISIS women to recruit their “sisters” from their native countries. Mahmood targeted young girls from the UK. The three teenagers who disappeared from Bethnal Green Academy in February 2015—Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana—were in communication with Mahmood prior to their departure. Their best friend Sharmeena Begum, an older classmate, had left the year before and was also lured by Mahmood. All the girls were among eight hundred British citizens believed to have joined the so-called caliphate from 2012 onward, even before the jihadi group was officially called ISIS in 2014. At its height, the ISIS caliphate attracted thirty thousand foreigners from one hundred different countries and ruled over ten million people.¹²⁹

After the girls arrived in Syria, they were married to foreign fighters and were encouraged to become pregnant immediately. According to British reports, Shamima, who was fifteen at the time, married twenty-one-year-old Yago Riedijk, a Dutch convert, ten days after she arrived in Raqqa.¹³⁰ Shamima chose her ISIS kunya (nom de guerre) as Umm Ahmed. Amira Abase, whose kunya was Umm Zubayr, married an eighteen-year-old Australian jihadist named Abdullah Elmir in July 2016. Elmir was a notorious commander who threatened to raise the ISIS flag above Buckingham Palace and the White House.¹³¹

Kadiza Sultana’s first husband, an American of Somali descent, was killed on the battlefield. He was featured in ISIS propaganda celebrating the decapitation of Christian prisoners. Kadiza (whose kunya was Umm Musa) died in April 2016 during a Russian airstrike. She was only seventeen.

Prior to her death, Kadiza had repeatedly expressed a desire to leave Syria and return home in phone calls with her parents. She had called her sister Halima in the UK and expressed her doubts: “I don’t have a good feeling, I’m scared.” Her sister inquired about the possibility of escaping through neighboring countries, and Kadiza replied: “The borders are closed right now, so how am I going to get out? I am not going to go through PKK [Kurdish forces in Syria] territory to come out. I am never going to do that, ever.” Halima thought her sister sounded terrified.¹³² Kadiza’s parents confirmed that she “had been talking about leaving. There was a plan to get her out.”¹³³ Kadiza was to complain about having a toothache and request to visit the dentist. ISIS usually let women seek medical care, but fearing defections ISIS was increasingly barring civilians from leaving its territory for any reason.¹³⁴ Fearing for her life after girls were executed for trying to escape, Kadiza married again instead of leaving. This time she married a blind foreign fighter, Taymullah al- Somali, who was best known for using his disability to recruit. He would post on social media: “Being blind didn’t stop me from coming to #Syria, what’s your excuse?”¹³⁵ After news of Kadiza’s death reached London, her family was devastated.

Amira’s death was, in many ways, even more gruesome and heartbreaking. Sharmeena Begum had posted on Instagram Stories about Amira’s last moments during the Battle for Baghouz, where she had refused to surrender. Amira had been hiding in a small trench with two other women and their children, all of whom were executed at point blank range by the “nonbelievers.”¹³⁶

The last surviving girl of the three from Bethnal Green Academy, Shamima Begum, begged the British government to allow her back to the UK for the sake of her then newborn baby. Her son, Jarrah, died of pneumonia in March 2019 not long after the British home secretary Sajid Javid refused to allow Begum back and declared her citizenship null and void.¹³⁷

In February 2021, Shamima lost her appeal to the UK Supreme Court, which ruled she could not return to the country to appeal the revocation of her citizenship. Shamima was portrayed by critics as a traitor who had helped recruit other girls to Syria, sown suicide vests, or been part of the dreaded hisbah, ISIS’s morality police. In contrast, according to sympathetic sources, Shamima was trafficked as a bride in Raqqa, the capital of ISIS. Begum gave birth to three children, all of whom died of malnutrition. She came into the limelight after a 2019 interview, where she was heavily criticized for her comments on Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.¹³⁸ Begum’s people smuggler was a former dentist turned soldier named Muhammed Rasheed. Rasheed worked for the infamous ISIS recruiter, Abu Qaqa, whose real name was Raphael Saiho Hostey from Manchester.¹³⁹

Shamima had been presumed dead like all the other Bethnal Green Academy girls. It wasn’t until February 2019 that British journalists discovered Shamima was alive. For many observers, her treatment despite being a victim of trafficking (it is worth remembering that when she left London, Shamima was fifteen, well under the age of consent) might have been different had she been white instead of Asian.¹⁴⁰

Like Aqsa Mahmood, Hoda Muthana lured American girls, encouraging them to come to the caliphate and become ISIS brides. In the fall of 2013, Hoda secretly set up a Twitter account on the new cell phone her father had given her for her high school graduation and, over time, gained thousands of followers. Online, she virtually “met” ISIS members and supporters like Mahmood.

Before she became radicalized, Hoda grew up with strict Yemeni parents who did not allow her to run wild with American girls. According to FBI profiles, one of the basic assumptions about the vulnerability of Muslim youth to radicalizing messages was that they spent too much time alone online. Hoda admitted that she had been a “naive, angry and arrogant young woman” when she left the United States for Syria.¹⁴¹ Although Hoda’s parents had tried to do everything right, imposing strict discipline and hands-on parenting, as soon as she got the chance, Hoda diverted the money her parents had paid for her University of Alabama tuition to buy a plane ticket to Turkey and then traveled to Syria.

By 2019, Hoda was being held by the Syrian Defense Forces, trapped in al-Roj detention camp without any means of returning to the United States. In an interview at the time, now disillusioned and eager to come home, she told her story to reporters. As a teenager back in Alabama, she recalled: “[I didn’t] have my own cell phone until I graduated from high school… . I had a laptop and stuff, but it wasn’t the same as having a phone everywhere you go.… I felt very lame really. So, once I did get it, I was very much into it. It was my first time, so I was always using it and I did most of the social media basically. I got into Twitter.”¹⁴²

Hoda acquired thousands of new followers by portraying herself as more pious and religious than she was. A religious friend of Hoda’s explained, “What she lacked in her personality she would make up for on Twitter.”¹⁴³ Her conservative, religious alter ego “UmmJihad,” using the account @ZumarulJannah, might have been a projection of who she wanted to be. Hoda’s father Mohammed recalled his daughter was actively involved in high school, participated in the school radio station, and was a gifted artist. She was involved in humanitarian causes like donating blood and helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. This contradicts Hoda’s narrative of isolation and boredom. Mohammed Muthana maintained a strict watch over his daughter but somehow missed the effect that social media had on her. Instead, when he would check her phone and find only Islamic apps installed on it,¹⁴⁴ he was gratified by his daughter’s newfound piety and the fact that she was memorizing entire verses of the Qur’an and becoming much more observant. He failed to realize that his daughter was emotionally and mentally separating herself from the family and preparing to leave home to enter a war zone. Muthana insisted that his daughter was a victim: “She’s not that kind of girl. They brainwashed her.”¹⁴⁵

When she arrived in Syria in November 2014, Hoda called home. She recalled in an interview: “I told [my family] when I crossed the border to Syria. I called my dad; I think it was [a couple of] days after. But I think they [had] already known because of my sister and then after a couple days, I called my dad. They were very upset, very, very angry at me. My dad told me, ‘Whatever you do, just don’t get married,’ I said to him, ‘I can’t avoid that.’ ”¹⁴⁶

Her mother screamed. But as Hoda explained, she’d felt duty bound to leave home and join the jihad: “I … was just thinking that it was obligatory on us to be in the caliphate. I was not part of any type of jihad. I never shot a gun, never used any weapons or anything. I literally came there because I thought it was obligatory on me. And I was very afraid of hell.”¹⁴⁷

Only once Hoda became pregnant did she start reconsidering the kind of future she and her unborn child would have in a war zone. She was only thinking about her family and the fate of her child when she confided to her friends, other foreign women, about the possibility of leaving the caliphate. They were all shocked: “The more I talked about the oppression of ISIS the more I lost friends. I was brainwashed once and my friends are still brainwashed.” Hoda explained further: “We [were] young people not knowing much about their religion, thinking they knew everything really, and we interpreted everything very wrong.”¹⁴⁸

Robert Palladino, a spokesman for the State Department during the Trump administration, described the situation as “extremely complicated.” Asked whether any of the women or children would be permitted to return, he said, “We’re looking into these cases to better understand the details,” but declined to comment further, citing privacy and security concerns. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo emphatically insisted, “She is not coming back.” after Trump tweeted on February 20, 2019, “I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!,” alleging that Muthana was not technically, legally, an American citizen despite having a birth certificate and being issued two passports over the course of her life (one of which she publicly burned on social media).¹⁴⁹

In an interview with ABC News, Hoda appealed directly to the American people in hopes of winning their sympathy and support for her to return to Alabama. Hoda echoed her father’s claims, agreeing that, yes, she had been brainwashed:

I hope America doesn’t think I’m a threat to them and I hope they can accept me. I was still at the peak of being brainwashed I guess and I had people all around me that were just widowed so we were very angry … because we were all just young girls married for the first time—most of us it was our first relationships—and then [her husband] just suddenly died. I can’t even believe I thought of that.¹⁵⁰

Hoda swore that she’d been traumatized by her experiences in Syria and had already lost her enthusiasm for the caliphate as early as 2016. She begged to come home: “We want to come back, and we’re not a threat, and we just regret everything. I wish I could erase the whole thing,” she told interviewers. Talking about her experiences in Syria, she said: “It’s horrifying. Everything is horrifying. You see executions in the street. You see dead bodies everywhere. You hear bombs. You hear someone screaming. You can’t go and help them for fear of your own life—screaming to death, basically. And you can’t do anything. It’s very traumatizing. Actually, since we’re here in the camps and we just hear a car passing by, we just duck down, because of how afraid we are.”¹⁵¹

Nonetheless, Hoda’s portrayal as a victim did not correspond with her online persona. On social media, tweeting as @UmmJihad, she appeared to be thoroughly radicalized. She even called for spilling blood and for the assassination of President Obama. When a New York Times reporter interviewed Muthana at al-Roj in February 2019, Hoda insisted that while she had posted tweets intended to incite attacks in the West and encourage women to join the Islamic State, she wasn’t truly radicalized. In January 2015, however, after residing in the Islamic State for several months, Hoda ridiculed American Muslims who stayed home and refused to emigrate: “There are so many Aussies and Brits here. But where are the Americans? Wake up, you cowards.” A few months later, in March of 2015, she wrote, “Americans, wake up. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy. Enough of your sleeping. Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them.”¹⁵²

In retrospect, Hoda, said, she wished that she could recant, despite having claimed in several interviews that someone had hijacked her Twitter account and that it was not her mocking pacifist Muslims or encouraging insider attacks.¹⁵³ “I wish I could take [the tweets] completely off the Net, completely out of people’s memory,” she told ABC News. “I regret it… . I hope America doesn’t think I’m a threat to them and I hope they can accept me and [that] I’m just a normal human being who’s been manipulated once and hopefully never again.¹⁵⁴

Hoda’s appeal was denied by the US Supreme Court in January 2022. Her legal team, from the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, called the outcome a “sad day for the Muthana family, and for the sanctity of United States citizenship in general.”¹⁵⁵

In contrast to Hoda’s statements of remorse, Shamima Begum initially told Sky News that she had no regrets about emigrating—up until her son died. In an interview in February 2019, she said: “I don’t regret it because it’s changed me as a person. It’s made me stronger, tougher. I married my husband. I wouldn’t have found someone like him back in the UK. I had my kids. I did have a good time there [in Syria], it’s just that at the end things got harder and I couldn’t take it anymore.”¹⁵⁶

Moreover, when asked about ISIS’s human rights violations and the daily acts of violence, Begum conceded that she was “perfectly comfortable with the use of capital punishment, such as beheadings, since it was religiously sanctioned in Islam.”¹⁵⁷

Her lack of regret appears to have played a part in how she has been perceived by the British public. When Quentin Sommerville of the BBC asked Begum whether she felt remorse over the British citizens killed by ISIS or the children who had died in the ISIS terrorist attack at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena in May 2017, she pretended not to know there were young people present at the concert. Begum quickly added that such attacks might be warranted and viewed as retribution, “fair justification,” and self-defense because Muslim women and children were being killed by aerial bombardments against ISIS.¹⁵⁸

Within two months of the initial media frenzy after Begum was discovered alive in April 2019, she changed her story with each media interview. When she realized, however, how the camp conditions would impact her pregnancy and the health of her then unborn child, she reversed herself yet again, expressing remorse about everything she had done. “Since I left Baghouz I really regretted everything I did, and I feel like I want to go back to the UK for a second chance to start my life over again,” she told a journalist from The Times of London. “I was brainwashed. I came here believing everything that I had been told, while knowing little about the truths of my religion.”¹⁵⁹ Begum looks back now at her decision to join ISIS and claims her choices make her sick to her stomach. When asked what she would say to her fifteen-year-old self she replied: “Don’t do it, bitch! That’s all I would say.”¹⁶⁰

Both Begum and Muthana were made stateless by their respective government’s decision to prevent repatriation and revoke their citizenship. In doing so, the United States and the UK violated international law, provoking public reactions both in favor of and against allowing ISIS women and children to return to their countries of origin. The debates continue. Some countries have accepted their nationals back, while others still worry that the women have been radicalized and might pose an ongoing threat to national security.

In Begum’s case Home Secretary Sajid Javid revoked her citizenship in February 2019 after she was discovered by journalists at the al-Roj refugee camp. He suggested that she return to Bangladesh, her parents’ country of origin. But Begum would have faced the death penalty had she traveled to Bangladesh because of her documented affiliation with the Islamic State. Furthermore, the Bangladeshi government disavowed Begum, denying that she had any status in their country.¹⁶¹ Begum’s lawyer in the UK, Tasnime Akunjee, blamed the British government for the Bethnal Green schoolgirls’ disappearance and insisted that the court “consider the failings of the UK government, which led to Ms. Begum becoming a child victim of trafficking.”¹⁶² Akunjee was referring to the fact that government officials failed to disclose that they had interrogated the underage girls without their parents’ permission after one of their upper classmates, Sharmeena Begum (no relation to Shamima), left for Syria. Counterterrorism officials interviewed Sharmeena’s entire group of friends at the time. According to Josh Baker and the I’m Not a Monster podcast, staff at Bethnal Green Academy realized that Sharmeena’s group of friends was at risk of recruitment. Despite their warnings, police and counterterrorism professionals disagreed with the school’s concerns. In the days just before the three girls left London, the police had asked to interview them. The police wrote to the girls’ parents, asking for permission, but handed the letters to the girls, who did not pass them on. When Shamima’s older sister found one of the letters, she called 999 (British version of 911), but it was too late.

After Sharmeena disappeared in 2014, her closest friends were questioned but not placed in protective custody or made “wards of the court” to offset the possibility that they might also have been radicalized and vanish.¹⁶³ This critical error meant that three of the four eventually left for Syria. Had the girls’ families been informed that one of their daughters’ closest friends (Sharmeena) had joined ISIS, they might have been able to prevent their own daughters from disappearing.¹⁶⁴ All of the information about the government’s failure to prevent the girls’ disappearance came out during the hearings adjudicating Shamima’s citizenship and right to return to the UK from Syria.

Unlike the Bethnal Green girls, three underage Americans who attempted to travel to Syria were returned home unscathed. In October 2014, three high school girls from Aurora, Colorado (a suburb of Denver), cut class and caught a United Airlines flight to Syria via Frankfurt after chatting with ISIS supporters online. (Because they were underage, legal documents did not publish their names.) They were two Somali sisters aged seventeen and fifteen at the time of their departure and their sixteen-year-old Sudanese friend. Because both families immediately contacted the FBI, German authorities met the girls when their flight touched down in Frankfurt, and they were sent straight back home to Colorado. The state’s attorney general, John Suthers, decided to not press charges.¹⁶⁵ As a result, the community became inoculated against ISIS recruitment in part because parents felt they could call the authorities without placing their children in jeopardy.

In May 2015, Jaelyn Delshaun Young, a nineteen-year-old honors student and cheerleader from Mississippi, was arrested for attempting to travel to Syria with her boyfriend, Muhammad Dakhlalla.¹⁶⁶ The daughter of a police officer and former navy reservist, Jaelyn had turned to the Internet after she abruptly converted to Islam in March 2015 because her boyfriend was Muslim. She began posting about ISIS online. Young’s messages were intercepted by undercover FBI agents who she thought were members of ISIS. In her communications with the federal agents Young declared, “I cannot wait to get to Dawlah [ISIS territory] so I can be amongst my brothers and sisters under the protection of Allah swt to raise little Dawlah cubs In sha Allah [God willing].”¹⁶⁷

The use of confidential informants and undercover operatives in the United States has meant that most of the women trying to emigrate were arrested before setting foot on foreign soil. The Department of Justice has adjudicated each woman on a case-by-case basis, allowing for reduced charges or a chance for the women to plead out. The women tend to receive sentences that are much lighter than those for men charged with joining ISIS or providing material support.¹⁶⁸ Through their research, Audrey Alexander and Rebecca Turkington found that women in jihadist groups were less likely to face criminal prosecution in the United States for participating in terrorist groups, “despite evidence that they engaged in the same types of support as their male counterparts. In our sample, approximately 90 percent of the cases were men—but incidents of women supporting jihadist groups continue to emerge, strongly suggesting that figure is an overestimation. It also doesn’t help that the U.S. government occasionally doesn’t issue press releases on arrests of female jihadists.”¹⁶⁹

Few women were prosecuted for involvement with ISIS before 2015, when they were still largely perceived as victims lacking agency. Even after women’s participation in domestic attacks in North America and Europe shifted that view, attitudes changed but prosecutions remained low. Part of the reason for the dearth of prosecutions was that ISIS women were less visible than the men on social media perpetrating crimes. The ISIS channels rarely posted about the women’s activities, and the “women only” Telegram channels mostly discussed health, piety, and family issues. Women were far more likely to have engaged in material support or aiding and abetting in the commission of human trafficking.¹⁷⁰ When women were prosecuted, the prosecution usually opted to plead to a lesser charge (for example, the case of Gigi Giampietro). The willingness of the prosecutors to accept pleas was because in many instances, the courts had ruled that there was insufficient proof that the women were likely to move from rhetoric to real world violence. In Europe, many women who returned were not detained upon arrival, and some were arrested only months later. Critics of repatriating ISIS women and girls find it neither surprising nor convincing when Western women try to return to their countries of origin and recant their support for the terrorist group or claim they were coerced. The problem is that some women were in fact coerced or duped into traveling to the region. Some women in the Balkans were told that there would be high-paying jobs for them in Turkey, only to find themselves stranded in ISIS territory with no avenue for escape, not speaking the language or knowing the way out.¹⁷¹

Marilyn Nevalainen, a Swedish sixteen-year-old, escaped ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq when Kurdish militias rescued her. In an interview, Marilyn described abysmal living conditions that did not resemble anything like the glossy images ISIS propagated online: “When I was there I didn’t have anything: no water, no electricity, didn’t have any money either. It was a really hard life.”¹⁷² Nevalainen might be the exception rather than the rule. Few countries have permitted foreign women to return home, and most foreign women who lived under the caliphate could not travel without a chaperone.

Some girls who tried to leave were more than likely killed by ISIS. Samra Kesinovic and Sabina Selimovic, two young Bosnian girls who left Vienna for Raqqa in April 2014, became poster girls for the fate of female emigrants. Samra was reportedly beaten to death for trying to escape. We know little about what happened to Sabina except that she too is dead. It appears that when they tried to flee, either their husbands or ISIS commanders killed them.

Most of the women who escaped from ISIS and survived seem to have been local women who spoke the language and knew the geography of the country. These Arab women nonetheless experienced a severe disconnect between what they expected life would be like in ISIS and the reality of how it was. This is something that holds true for people, both male and female, who have left terrorist organizations more generally.

ISIS Women on the Frontlines?

ISIS deliberately cultivated confusion about whether women would fight on the battlefront once they arrived. They did this by posting propaganda images and videos across their extensive social media that showed “sisters” holding Kalashnikov rifles and practicing their sniper skills. Images of veiled Australian women, heavily armed, draped across Toyota trucks circulated throughout the ISIS networks and semi-encrypted platforms like Telegram and on the dark web. Yet women who joined ISIS were not actually allowed to fight or carry out suicide operations despite ISIS’s insinuation that they might be. While women could participate with a female version of the hisbah (religious morality police), the women in the Khansa’a Brigade enjoyed privileges the other women did not. Al-Khansa’a women were trained to use weapons; permitted to drive and earn a wage; and could patrol the streets without a mahrim.¹⁷³

Jihadi terror groups that initially prevented women from fighting, such as al Qaeda and Boko Haram, eventually changed their position on whether women could engage in jihad—not because of some new interpretation of Qur’anic law, but for practical reasons, because women could penetrate hard targets or sneak into public spaces equipped with improvised explosive devices without raising suspicion. A woman wearing an IED around her midsection could easily give the appearance of late-term pregnancy. Even absent combat roles, women were crucial to the Islamic State, primarily by helping legitimize ISIS’s goal of constructing a utopian Islamic society. There could be no real state without women and children. Therefore the women were essential, even if they weren’t fighting on the front lines. Other jihadist websites supported women’s mobilization for nonviolent actions, including videos of women speaking on contemporary issues, calling on Muslim women to defend wearing the niqab (full veil) in Europe, and engaging in peaceful civil resistance and demonstrating for Islamist initiatives.

This confusion over whether women could fight on the front lines is at the core of why we have misjudged so many of the women in ISIS. Though, as we saw in the introduction, Congresswoman Kathleen Rice correctly identified the many ways in which women were exploited by ISIS terrorists, she incorrectly assumed ISIS permitted women to fight.

ISIS’s Arabic rulings (called fatwas) presented rules for women that were uncompromisingly strict. Women were not permitted to fight or engage in battle with the enemy. This was disappointing for some of the Western women and girls who left to join ISIS, who had assumed they would be fighting with the men.

Aqsa Mahmood was one of ISIS’s most accomplished recruiters, a nineteen-year-old radiology student from Glasgow turned ISIS propagandist. Mahmood, known as Umm Layth, left the UK in 2013 expecting, according to her social media, to be allowed to fight.

Shannon Maureen Conley, a nurse from Colorado, trained with the Army Explorers, a US military cadet program, in preparation for fighting on the front lines. The Halane sisters, British Somali twins, bemoaned their plight on Twitter; they had married foreign fighters, and yet after their husbands’ deaths, they were still not permitted to fight. Most vocally, British convert Khadijah Dare expressed her desire to be the first ISIS woman to behead an American or a Brit after James Foley’s death on August 19, 2014.¹⁷⁴ Her four-year-old son Isa was filmed pressing a remote-control device causing a vehicle with three people inside to blow up, making him ISIS’s youngest (albeit inadvertent) executioner. In December 2019 an Irish court sentenced thirty-eight-year-old Lisa Marie Smith to Dochas prison after she was charged with being a member of a terrorist organization and providing material support.¹⁷⁵ Smith, like Conley a trained fighter, had been with the Irish Defense Forces. She joined ISIS in Syria in 2015 yet, despite her previous military training, was never deployed on the front lines.

The reality of women’s lives in ISIS was mostly mundane and largely domestic. In court documents, the women begrudgingly admit they weren’t even allowed to leave the house—let alone fight like the men.

The crimes for which women were most likely to be charged were material support of terrorism and aiding and abetting human trafficking. ISIS was pathbreaking in its ability to get women to recruit other women. According to the scholar Charlie Winter, writing for the website Jihadology, in 2014 there were over two dozen women in Syria on social media exhorting their sisters in Islam to join them in the caliphate. Umm Haritha (from Canada) and Umm Layth (Aqsa Mahmood from the UK) were among the most prolific on social media, persuading would-be “sisters” to travel to the Middle East to build an extremist vision of Islamic society.¹⁷⁶ Recruitment centered on Muslim dating sites where women sought their dreamboat mujahid or employment sites where they would apply without necessarily realizing their ultimate destination was ISIS.

The Scottish-born Aqsa Mahmood recruited English-speaking women from the UK and the United States. Her online presence was a testament to the fact that women were pivotal disseminators of propaganda, especially to young women curious about life in the caliphate. Observing Mahmood’s messaging provides insights into what was expected of “sisters” who emigrated to Raqqa. In her blog, Mahmood chastised women who had taken to social media to complain about their limited roles in the Islamic State:

I have stressed this before on twitter but I really need sisters to stop dreaming about coming to Shaam [Syria] and not getting married. Wallahi [by God] life here is very difficult for the Muhajirat [emigrant women] and we depend heavily on the brothers for a lot of support. It is not like the west where you can casually walk out and go to Asda/Walmart and drive back home.… [E]ven till now we have to stay safe outside and must always be accompanied by a Mahram.¹⁷⁷

On Twitter, Mahmood described the deep fulfillment of being a wife, even a second or third wife: “Only after becoming the wife of a Mujahid do you realize why there is so much reward in this action.” She also chastised young widows who complained about being “recycled,” that is, married off again to another jihadi so quickly that they lost their right to a mourning period (‘idda). She wrote scathingly, “You already know you wanted to marry a mujahid so why did you not read up on what will be the rulings for you after his departure?” Given that an ISIS husband’s primary aim was martyrdom, wives needed to gear up for the “hefty reality” of his death. They would “most probably have to sooner or later hear the news of [their] husbands [sic] success, which is his shahada [declaration of faith],” so they needed to be prepared for it.¹⁷⁸

ISIS used a web of recruiters to lure foreign girls to join them in Syria. From its social media, one could glean a lot about the logistics of ISIS’s matchmaking industry. First, the group allowed the girls traveling to Syria to break with the strict Islamic religious norm of not traveling without a male chaperone from their family—usually a brother or an uncle. Second, we know that upon arrival, single women were obligated to live in an all-female dormitory called the maqar or madafas (a shared house for single women like a dorm). In her social media instructions to women traveling to Syria, a recruiter known as Umm Anwar explained what women could expect upon their arrival in the Islamic State: “Single Sisters who wish to come here you get married, if not yous [sic] will be staying in a maqar #IS.”¹⁷⁹ The guesthouse was kept deliberately squalid, to encourage the girls to find a husband and leave quickly.¹⁸⁰

Hoda Muthana claimed, however, that the dorm was more like a prison, where the windows were locked, and guards were posted in the front yard. According to the journalist Nabeelah Jaffer: “After being placed in a maqar a woman writes down what sort of ‘brother’ she wants to marry. The emir of the area matches her with someone and sets up a brief meeting, after which, if both parties are agreeable, the marriage quickly takes place… . But if the woman’s father refused, the emir would go ahead and marry them anyway.”¹⁸¹ The male ISIS fighters would visit the dorm to select their brides-to-be. According to some reports, women could theoretically refuse a proposal, but the reality was quite different. Women could not leave the dorm until they were married. Then they could begin to fulfill their primary “fundamental role” as wives and mothers.

A great deal of ISIS propaganda centered on positive messages about empowerment, featuring doctors treating the sick or showing aid workers feeding the poor. The propaganda machine was so extensive that it was tailored for different audiences.¹⁸² The propaganda specifically targeting women used different messages than the ones for men, although both groups were told it was a religious obligation to emigrate. In the propaganda for women, a woman’s purpose was clear: ISIS needed them to procreate and birth the next generation of jihadi fighters. A “Sisters” article entitled “I Will Outnumber the Other Nations Through You” was explicit about their contribution:

Islam encourages bearing children for numerous reasons. Perhaps the most significant of these is to increase the Muslim population so as to strengthen the Ummah … with the birth of every newborn Muslim, a thorn is planted into the throat of kufr [apostate] … by increasing the number of Muslims, the despicable are suffocated and the banners of the kuffār [disbeliever] are lowered, just as the voices of the righteous are raised.¹⁸³

The Islamic State offered men the chance to prove their manliness and faith by joining the fight; women were extended the idea of sisterhood, the chance to marry a brave jihadi fighter and support the cause by raising the next generation of ISIS Cubs—who would follow in their fathers’ footsteps.¹⁸⁴ Online cheerleaders like Aqsa Mahmood who lured the girls to Syria and Iraq extolled the virtues of marriage but acknowledged that there were some obvious challenges, for example, language barriers between the spouses, although these, the girls were told, could be a source of amusement instead of miscommunication about which to worry.¹⁸⁵

Rather than dread their husband’s inevitable passing, women were encouraged to consider the death an honor and being a martyr’s widow a privilege. The sixteen-year-old British Somali twins Zahra and Salma Halane journeyed from Manchester, England, to Raqqa in 2014 and were married to foreign fighters within weeks of their arrival. Before they ran away from the UK, they had appeared to be ordinary teenagers who dreamed of becoming doctors and were dedicated Manchester United soccer fans. The teenagers had been radicalized online by a peer, Mahmood, around twenty at the time, who facilitated the twins’ travel to Syria and arranged their marriages to foreign fighters upon their arrival.¹⁸⁶ Zahra married Ali Kalantar, a nineteen-year-old Afghan from Coventry, England, who was killed in Iraq on December 4, 2014. Zahra announced her husband’s martyrdom on social media, and a week later, sister Salma proudly announced that her own husband had also been killed. The girls celebrated their mutual widowhood online—rejoicing not necessarily because they were proud of their husbands’ martyrdom and sacrifice, but at the prospect of seeing each other in the maqar again, as they had been kept apart for months for the first time in their lives. Salma took to Twitter, posting, “He was a blessing from Allah swt [heart] please make dua [prayers] Allah accepts him and I will join him very sooooon:’).” Zahra tweeted: “My twin sister @bint_ibrah3m husband got shahadah too the same time as mine LOOL we made hijrah [migration] together now both ‘idda [mourning period] together. So right now!? My husband is probably with his hoor al ‘ayns” [the seventy-two virgins that martyrs are promised in the afterlife] ?:0.

ISIS widows were instructed to avoid being seen out in public during the mourning period. On her ask.fm page, Zahra insisted that she did not mind living alone and was not lonely because “Alhamdulillah [God willing] I have my sister whom I love for the sake of Allah always at my house.”¹⁸⁷

What the online recruiters failed to transmit to their prospective recruits was that when (and not if) their husbands died, they would be sent back to another, far less comfortable dorm than the maqar where they lived when they first arrived. This other maqar was reserved for the widows of ISIS’s fallen heroes, called the “shuhada’ [martyrs’] maqar.” The Islamic tradition of granting a mourning period, or ‘idda, is explicit and clear. The waiting period, ‘idda, is not only required but is a woman’s right, to allow her to grieve.¹⁸⁸ Islamic religious law surrounding bereavement dictates that a woman may not marry until four months and ten days have passed since her husband’s death. This period of mourning not only offers women psychological benefits but also has the instrumental advantages of making sure the widow isn’t pregnant when she remarries, which could result in confusion over paternity. ISIS violated Islamic law by reducing this mandated period of quiet contemplation, quickly selecting a new groom for the widow. ISIS widows were meted out to foreign fighters almost immediately—sometimes with only days between the funeral and the next wedding.

While many of the female foreign fighters were radical, not every woman who married an ISIS fighter did so because of radical beliefs. According to profiles in the New York Times, some women married fighters “to assuage the Organization [ISIS] and keep their families in [good] favor,” just as they “joined the al Khansa’a Brigade [which patrolled the streets of Raqqa] to win some freedom of movement and an income.”¹⁸⁹ But even if they joined the female brigade, women’s status depended on the rank of the men to whom they were married.

The Khansa’a policing brigade was designed to safeguard women’s honor and prevent “debauchery resulting from [women’s] grooming and overdressing.”¹⁹⁰ In their invasive dress and behavioral codes, they were akin to the hisbah police who monitor Saudi women’s modesty on the street. Sentences ranged from flogging for wearing inappropriate clothes to death by stoning for adultery. ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq was fixated on controlling every aspect of women’s lives, lest it result in a violation of the honor code, from what women wore, how many children they gave birth to, and whether they could leave the house. Researcher Gina Vale elaborated on the limitations imposed on women in the Islamic State:

With time, women’s bodies were entirely erased. The stipulated dress code—issued by the group’s “Virtue and Vice Committee”—evolved from the niqāb to eventually incorporate long gloves, socks, and a thick, twin-layered covering over the entire face, including the eyes. Even women’s voices were considered ʿawra [intimate] and were to be lowered but not flirtatiously soft. As a result, women were prohibited from being in the company of unrelated men and were largely absent from the group’s propaganda.¹⁹¹

Three women profiled by Azadeh Moaveni in the New York Times in November 2015, using the pseudonyms Dua, Aws, and Asma from Raqqa, were members of the brigade who left ISIS when the organization pressured them to remarry too soon after their husbands’ demise. When Dua’s husband was killed in battle, she was visited ten days later by a member of her husband’s unit who informed her that she was expected to marry him. This violated her ‘idda. Dua felt that a mourning period was her right as a Muslim. It was often at this point, when they were denied ‘idda, that women who were fervent supporters of the organization began to question their purpose and role in the Islamic State. Such was the case for these three Raqqa girls, who experienced their change of heart precisely when they were denied ‘idda and opted to return to their families. But even in the realm of divine law, the Islamic State was reformulating everything.¹⁹²

Not long after Dua was widowed, her cousin Aws faced the same predicament—being forced to remarry shortly after her husband was killed. Aws told Moaveni: “They told me that [my husband] was a martyr now, obviously he didn’t need a wife anymore, but that there was another fighter who did. They said this fighter had been my husband’s friend and wanted to protect and take care of me on his behalf.”¹⁹³

It wasn’t only to buoy the men’s morale and ensure their loyalty that ISIS provided its foreign fighters with wives. In the words of a Syrian fighter, ISIS leaders understood that “there are institutions. There are civilians [that ISIS] is in charge of, and wide territories. It must help the immigrants marry. These are the components of a state and it must look after its subjects.” When the organization was awash with foreign fighters, it could promise more than a salary and a free house; the men were offered a wife, a Yezidi slave girl, a car, and other benefits. ISIS was mindful that “helping fighters marry is a key priority. Aside from the normal stipend, foreign fighters receive $500 when they marry to help them start a family. [One twenty-eight-year-old] got a particularly large bonus because his new wife is a doctor and speaks four languages.”¹⁹⁴

Since the quality of the women’s lives depended on the status of their husband, trading down had serious implications. As one British militant wrote in one ask.fm post: “As I say to all sisters, it depends upon the man whom you marry. Whether he wants a simple house wife [sic] whom he can just lock in doors [sic] or a brother who is more outgoing and wants for his wife more than that simple life.”¹⁹⁵

The higher ranked the husband, the better the house, the better the car, the more lucrative his monthly stipend, and the more material possessions to which his wife would have access. As widows, women became instantly less valuable since they were no longer “pure” virgins and were less desirable. The next husband would inevitably be lower rank than the first, which translated into a downgrade in lifestyle, amenities, and benefits. The fact that the new husband would be less important and less influential than the first was the inevitable outcome of the fact that the woman was deemed “used goods,” according to ISIS’s ranking system.

Worse still, al-Khansa’a Brigade’s manifesto justified child marriage: “It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by sixteen or seventeen, while they are still young and active.”¹⁹⁶ Evidently (and inevitably), a woman’s youth and virginity were desirable attributes for male foreign fighters. This also explains why ISIS recruiters trolled for high school girls on social media.

ISIS propagandists found whatever religious justification they could to validate what the organization did. For example, religious expert Jaid Bin Khalid al Juhani, who narrated the righteous Hadith, cited Bukhari 2843 “Whoever prepares a fighter in the Cause of Allah had indeed fought, and whoever takes care of a fighter’s family [in his absence] had indeed fought,” adding: “Sisters can buy a weapon for brothers and have the same rewards [in paradise]. Subhan Allah, hurry up!”¹⁹⁷

Far from the battlefield, women could contribute to the cause, but they were most useful online.