The Role of Women in Daesh 1 Terrorist women profile

The profile of these women constitutes a typological diversity causing an obsta-cle when establishing particular features in the case of religious ideology� They are young female converts or come from Muslim backgrounds, both practicing and non-practicing families, that in principle were not especially devoted to the Islamic religion in many cases� It would frequently happen that they would be-come radicalized after suffering traumas, or as a consequence of a subtle, skilled manipulation process by extremist groups�

Regarding education, broadly speaking, the educational level of women recruited is low or very low, covering only the most basic education� Except for a few of them having higher level studies, some of them reaching university level, the social groups to which they belong can be both rural or urban, middle class or disadvantaged

so-Hallar Abderrahaman Mohamed 128

cial and economic environments� This situation makes them much more vulnerable to suffer manipulation by insurgent groups, given their lack of culture and the fact that many of them had never left the confines of their small world�⁸

Several studies conclude that the age range of these women is generally be-tween 15 and 35 years old and in most of the cases their civil situation is single in all countries�

In terms of social environment, the recruited girls may have worked in licit or illicit professions – sometimes both of them – and had unstructured or normal-ized lives, having solely a European social-cultural outlook, or this mixed with habits from the country of origin� The wide game of sociological features makes it impossible to determine a standard profile�⁹ But despite not having a standard profile, we can point to certain psychological and social vulnerabilities, used by radicals to guarantee that women join the terrorist war�

4.2 Recruitment Process

To explain the enormous attraction the new global terrorist matrix is causing among many Muslim women we need to underline the implementation of a re-cruitment campaign designed specifically for them� The efforts to recruit women to Daesh start with the identification of possible matches undergoing a moment of psychological and/or social weakness� Once the woman is located, the or-ganization makes considerable effort to convince her that these kinds of actions contradict neither the Islamic principles nor the usual responsibilities of a Muslim woman, which is another clear example of manipulation�

Daesh, aware of the importance of recruiting young women, uses social net-works like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc� to reach them� Knowing that the youngest of these women spend a lot of time on the Internet and it is an ideal space to take advantage of disaffection toward Western culture and, at the same time, increase the extreme identification with radical ideas�

8 A� Rubin, Woman says she told police about paris attacker’s hide-out, “The New York Times” 2008, available at http://www�nytimes�com/2016/02/05/world/europe/woman-says-she-told-police-about-paris-attackers-hide-out�html?ref=topics&_r=0, accessed 6 January de 2016�

9 R� Torres, L� Ponce, Reislamización digital y yihadismo europeo: claves comprensivas para la intervención social comunitaria, “Sistema” no� 240, 2015, pp� 101–116�

Woman and ISIS: Social Diagnosis and Interventions 129

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue analyses the importance of the romance factor as one of the motivations that make young women join a terrorist group in the occupied territories�¹⁰

Up until 2012, female participation in such activities carried out in the Spanish territory was promoted mainly by the attraction of a male (relative or partner) and related to support tasks and housework (other tasks such as, legalizing the man’s administrative situation), It was not related to the operative’s activities in terrorist militancy� From 2013, in the context of conflict in Syria and Iraq, the situation has changed: the first cases of mobilized women – motivated by their partners and by themselves, after being recruited and radicalized normally through so-cial networks connected to Daesh – were reported� According to the families’

testimonies, most of the times they were seduced by a romantic vision of life in the Caliphate, while only a small proportion of them joined with the intention to form the first line of combat, something that, in the end, would not happen since the active practice of violence is very far from the Daesh idea of what the feminist jihad should be�¹¹

In the recruitment process, women play a very important role of recruiting other women� As Ramachandran says, the terrorist groups have taken advantage of the “martyrdom” of female suicide bombers through an extended use of propa-ganda, getting more attention and publicity for their cause� The image of young women fighting desperately against the powerful (be it Israel, Russia or the USA) through the extreme practice of blowing themselves up has an immediate global effect� Even though the suicide attacks causes wide condemnation, the vision of a woman that sacrifices her life for the Palestinian cause defying traditions, draws the attention to the desperation an entire people�¹²

The Daesh recruitment networks do not miss out on the great capacity of women to spread propaganda and recruit new members through their profiles in social networks, where tales about the crisis in Western values can be found, as well as frustrations from the difficulties in practicing their religion in their countries of origin to the satisfaction of living alongside their “sisters” and “liv-ing honorably under Sharia law”, spread“liv-ing an idyllic vision of the life project

10 C� Garcia, Las Mujeres del Estado Islámico, Instituto Elcano 2001, available at http://

www�realinstitutoelcano�org/wps/portal/web/rielcano_es/contenido?WCM_GLOB- AL_CONTEXT=/elcano/elcano_es/zonas_es/terrorismo+internacional/comentario-garciacalvo-las-mujeres-del-estado-islamico, accessed 5 January 2016�

11 Ibid�

12 S� Ramachandran, Women Suicide Bombers Defy Israel, “Asia Times”, available at www.

atimes.com/atimes/Middle-East/EJ25Ak02.html, accessed 2 January 2016�

Hallar Abderrahaman Mohamed 130

offered by Daesh, as documented by Carol Hoyle, Alexandra Bradford and Ross Frenett, in their empirical work “Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS�” The authors point out that these women support the brutal use of violence with the same intensity as their male companions and they manifest it as such in their social network profiles, even though only very few of them are interested in practicing it in an active way�¹³

4.3 Motivations to participate

The reasons why they travel are as varied as the women themselves� We could look at several reasons that motivate them to go; one of them is ideology – just as men, women are convinced that they would go straight to paradise if they die fighting for Islam� A new vision of Islam is presented to them in a very attractive manner, as the only way to bring themselves closer to God� Theocratic cosmopolitanism is another reason, most women express their deep grievances at the treatment of Muslims across the world, and deplore the West’s foreign policy, they have feel-ings of hate for everything they consider foreign, and their only solution is an ideal Islamic society built on their strict interpretation of Islamic law where they can carry out their practice� The feelings of rejection from the society to which they belong but with which they do not identify, the search for an Islamic identity and the sense of unity and sisterhood are also key causal factors for women who travel�¹⁴

Lastly, one possible motivation is the women’s demand for equality that they have not had in their place of origin� This struggle for equality is causing women to be used by certain groups and people with specific interests� It encourages them to give everything for this desired equality that many will probably never reach, no matter how many empty promises they receive or how much they try to convince them with acts of uncertain temporality� Sadly, the eagerness of these women to escape a life predestined to man’s subordination and dedicated to the exercise of irrelevant and accessory social tasks, remains a failed attempt� It is clear that within these groups women are blatantly discriminated against, and that it is not even hidden in the public sphere�

13 C� Hoyle, A� Bradfor and R� Frenett, Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2015, available at http://www.strategicdialogue.

org/publications/, accessed 4 January 2016�

14 Ibid�

Woman and ISIS: Social Diagnosis and Interventions 131

5. Proposals for Prevention and Intervention in Radicalization