WUNRN
Meet Female Recruiters of ISIS
By
Katie Zavadski - September
4, 2014
Umm
Ubaydah with her friends, Umm Haritha and Umm Layth. Photo:
@_UmmWaqqas
Umm Ubaydah doesn’t have a blue checkmark verifying her
as a muhajirah on Twitter. And yet, she’s become, along with a group
of other young Western muslim women, an active online surrogate for the
terrorist group ISIS.
While their husbands are out
fighting, these women communicate ISIS’s message to the outside world, and
particularly to other women curious about the same cause. Because of their
youth and Western upbringings, they do so in slang and emoji, intermixed with a
handful of Islamic phrases that they have picked up. As the recent
widespread distribution of beheading videos on U.S. social media has shown,
ISIS brings plenty of propaganda savvy to its brutal campaign. Women like Umm
Ubaydah, who uses the handle @al_Khanssaa (possibly a reference to the poet) are a critical component of
that effort.
Mostly in their late teens or
early 20s, these women meet through Twitter, Tumblr, and Kik, where they
exchange verses of the Quran, statements of English- and Arabic-speaking
radical preachers, and news about the advances of the Islamic state. The most
ardent among them, including Umm Ubaydah and her friends — Umm Layth, whose real name was revealed to be Aqsa
Mahmood; and Umm Haritha, a Canadian immigrant, whose online
moniker is @bintladen, a portmanteau of the Arabic word for girl and
Osama bin Laden — have gone further, moving to Syria from Europe and North
America to find husbands among ISIS soldiers.
“We have a long history of
women’s involvement online and as propagandists” in jihadi movements, says Mia
Bloom, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell’s Center for
Security and Terrorism studies and author of a book on female suicide
terrorists. Dozens of purported jihadis have cropped up online in recent years,
including over a dozen women. (Twitter has recently stepped up its efforts to
suspend ISIS-linked users.) Some of them are likely fakes, Bloom says, but a
few stand out as particularly believable. To evaluate the veracity of online accounts,
experts like Bloom consider the person’s interactions with others, length of
time active, and consistency across different platforms. Umm Ubaydah, like the
others, checks out on all three.
Umm Ubaydah emerged on Twitter at
around the same time as ISIS announced the creation of two female brigades in
its territories, albeit not for active combat: one to keep men from the
opposition from dressing up in traditional, concealing female clothing as they
pass through checkpoints, and another to enforce ISIS’s strict standards of
dress and morality on other women. But these Western immigrants, based on their
online presences, are taking on even more traditional roles. According to
Humera Khan, head of a think tank focused on preventing radicalization and extremism,
Umm Ubaydah's off-line friendships are clear in her online interactions, and
draw other women in.
When I reached out to Umm Ubaydah
via Kik last week, she didn’t respond, although she quickly tweeted about
Western journalists asking her for her thoughts on Nutella. But an analysis of
her timeline tells at least some of her story.
From the ISIS-controlled city of
Manbij, Syria, Umm Ubaydah gives advice to those considering making the
crossing: what to pack, what to expect, and how to avoid detection on their way
to joining the hundreds of Westerners now fighting on behalf of the Islamic
state. ISIS propaganda and hopes about becoming a martyr are punctuated with
teen internet slang — "#lol," "tbh" — and emoji. She writes
about being a wife and aspiring to become a mother, and bringing up the next
generation of mujahids, or jihadis. Umm Ubaydah tells women that
there is not much for them to do in the state, that their contribution comes in
the home and through reaching out to other women online. This, according to
Bloom, is typical of successful militant groups: Women only join the front
lines as suicide bombers or combatants if the group has trouble attracting men.
If that’s not a concern, marrying jihadis to like-minded women serves to
reinforce their motivations.
Believed to be in her teens or
early 20s, Umm Ubaydah won’t reveal where she’s from on Twitter, except
that it’s in Northern Europe (likely Sweden, according to Khan, the think tank
director). Instead of a selfie, her Twitter icon is a spliced-together image of
Osama bin Laden and ISIS Caliph Abu bakr al-Baghdadi. Among the few
biographical details she openly shares is that she is of Somali descent.
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