WUNRN
Islamic State's Female Bloggers Draw European Women to Syria
Masked Spanish police officers lead a
detained woman in Melilla, Dec. 16, 2014, as Spanish and Moroccan police have
arrested seven people in an ongoing joint swoop on suspected efforts to recruit
women to go to Syria and Iraq to support Islamic State insurgents. (photo
by REUTERS/Jesus Blasco de Avellaneda)
Author: Brenda StoterPosted December 23,
2014
AMSTERDAM — When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared
a caliphate in June, he called on Muslims around the world to be a part of
it. The invitation extended to preachers, engineers, judges, doctors and
people with military and administrative experience, basically every Muslim who
wanted to play a role in the creation of a new Islamic caliphate,
including women.
Initially it was widely believed that
young women who were lured to Syria by the Islamists had gone there to
provide sexual services to
members of the Islamic State (IS). It was
later revealed, however, that the women who join IS primarily
fulfill traditional roles, such as taking care of the household. Mary, the
mother of Vanessa, a 19-year-old Dutch woman who joined IS in August,
underlined that women generally have noncombatant roles.
“Vanessa told me that she cooks for her
husband and his friends, also fighters, and that she spends a lot of time with
other Western women. Basically, women are there to raise a family. The more
women, the more children, the more fighters,” Mary explained to
Al-Monitor. She is devasted by the choice her daughter has made, but tries
to remain in contact with her as much as possible.
On Facebook, Twitter and other social
media sites, young Muslim women who live in the so-called Islamic
State portray their lives as a sort of Disneyland for Muslims. IS'
recruitment campaign is mostly conducted online, and female jihadists have
proved to be some of the best propagandists. They share pictures of
their dinners, write blogs about their husbands and encourage others to join them by posting
sentimental status updates about the advantages of living in an Islamic
state. They even offer to help plan the trips of
those interested in joining them.
Photographs of cozy dinners, jars of Nutella
and romantic updates about their husbands are not the only things Western women
share on social media, however. Those who join IS also learn how to handle
an AK-47 (“women here don’t ask for jewelry, they go for a kalash”),
excitedly show off such items as suicide belts (“a gift from my husband”) and
glorify the murder of opponents by decapitation (“I can watch those videos over
and over again”).
Although most of the women fulfill such
traditional roles as taking care of the household and giving birth and raising
children, they are also allowed to work. An English-speaking woman
who runs the Diary of a Muhajirah wrote
on her Facebook page that
women can work as teachers, doctors and nurses. “The Islamic State is
planning more programs which sisters can benefit from. And if you are
single and you don’t want to get married, no one will force you. You can stay
in an all-sisters hostel and get a monthly allowance,” she wrote.
Two
of the posts from Diary of a Muhajirah
Mary told Al-Monitor that her daughter had
stayed at one of the all-sisters hostels, where foreign women from Belgium, the
Netherlands, Germany and Sweden lived. Two days after arriving in Syria,
Vanessa married the fighter she had met online and moved to a city near the
Turkish border. According to Mary, Vanessa’s husband, a European in his early
20s, recently took a second wife from another European country who
had traveled to Syria with her child.
Foreign women also enforce Sharia. On
Oct. 8, Sara, a Dutch teenager who joined IS when she was 17, told her
Facebook friends that IS had asked her to whip Syrian women who had violated
the law. Seven Syrian women, “troublemakers,” as Sara called them, had
been sentenced to 15 or 30 lashes because they had fought each other.
“It was a fun, new experience,” wrote Sara,
who married a Belgium fighter named Brian de Mulder and is reportedly pregnant
with his child. Most of the responses were laudatory, including one from
another European woman living in Raqqa, who said that she would like to “hand
out lashes” as well. Some girls expressed mild criticism.
“I don’t think I could ever do such a thing,”
one Muslim girl said. Sara replied by saying that some things are more
important than feeling sorry for the women. “Well, I do not understand how
people can be so weak not to implement Allah's laws. May he guide and
forgive all of us,” she concluded.
One of the first things IS does after
conquering an area is to instruct women on how to behave and dress. Women
are required to be covered from head to toe, including a face veil.
The women of the Khansaa Brigade, an all-female moral police
force, make sure women stick to the rules. A number of Western women have been
reported as having joined the brigade.
It appears that it is not simply marriage
that attracts these women to IS, although some of them planned their trips to
Syria and Iraq after falling in love with a fighter. The deeper,
underlying motivation for joining IS is that they want to live in a purely
Islamic state, to follow Allah’s rules, and because they want to play a role in
the state-building process.
After the caliphate was declared, Muslim
families from across Europe, women
and children included, joined IS. Still, young girls between the ages
of 16 and 24 are mostly drawn by the idea of living in an Islamic state.
“Sisterhood” seems to play an important role in their decision. A lot of girls
plan their trips together and rely on each other after arriving in Syria
or Iraq.
“My daughter was always looking for a group
to belong to, and she found that in Syria. It doesn’t matter where the girls
come from,” said Vanessa's mother, “because they are all there for the
same purpose.”