Chapter Three
DECEPTION
Iraq
The sound of his voice was heavy. In July 2014, the leader of the world’s new terror nightmare, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), declared, “Rush, oh Muslims, to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The Earth belongs to Allah!” Draped in black, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood at the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in the Iraqi city of Mosul to separate the world into two: the believers (that is, the righteous followers of Islam) and the nonbelievers (or the kufr, which include “the camp of the Jews, the Crusaders, and their allies”). An old enemy disguised as new, al-Baghdadi made no mention of women. But his predecessor did.
The former al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, understood that Muslim women could inflict greater damage on his perceived enemies: the United States and its Muslim allies. Jordanian-born Al-Zarqawi reinvented the role of Muslim women by telling them to join the cause and be suicide bombers; marry an insurgent; recruit other women; and support terrorism by being a facilitator, messenger, logistics provider, and much more. Once jailed in Jordan, Al-Zarqawi was released in 1999 as part of a general amnesty granted by King Abdullah II but then sentenced to death a year after his release for the murder of a US diplomat. To Jordan and the rest of the world, Al-Zarqawi was a high-value target and a wanted man.
When Al-Zarqawi led al-Qaeda in Iraq, he encouraged women to join the movement. It’s likely that Al-Zarqawi understood the unique role that female operatives could play, becoming effective weapons. He opened the space for women to join his dangerous organization to strap on the bomb and hit prime targets that men could not easily reach, such as tribal leaders, Shia mosques, the marketplace, police checkpoints, US coalition forces, and more. Perhaps Al-Zarqawi knew that women swaddled in layers of bulky clothing could breeze through public places and male-guarded checkpoints without being stopped; before the entry of female American soldiers, searching Muslim women in a conservative society was a cultural taboo.
I wasn’t surprised. I knew from studying other conflicts that women take up arms when men call on them to join their revolutionary cause. For centuries, women, even my own mother, joined secular-nationalist movements to make a difference and effect change. Reading through the literature on women in war, I became convinced that Muslim female fighters are no different from secular women. They are often motivated by personal reasons, rather than political factors.
After leaving the Counterterrorism Center, I began to write and speak about women in the Islamic world. Al-Qaeda’s war in Iraq enabled women to participate as equal partners in violence. In winter 2005, I published my first editorial piece, titled “The Bomber Behind the Veil,” in the Baltimore Sun and predicted what I suspected to be true—female bombers would be the next stealth bomb: “An attack by a woman in one location could have a rippling effect and serve as a motivator for other women.” Female attackers and accomplices surfaced in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, and Western countries.
Al-Zarqawi may have been the first contemporary male terrorist leader to include female operatives, but he would not be the last. As a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, I tracked the female terrorists of Iraq. When US troops entered Iraq in March 2003, a rare martyrdom video showed a forty-something Wadad Jamil Jassem declaring, “I have devoted myself to jihad for the sake of God and against the American, British, and Israeli infidels and to defend the soil of our precious and dear country.” Jassem was not a member of al-Qaeda but proved early on that women could be deadly, determined, and decisive to the war, even when attacks by women appeared to be irregular and incidental acts of violence.
In 2005, two separate attacks by female operatives surprised authorities. On November 9, Muriel Degauque died in a suicide car bombing in Iraq. A Belgian convert to Islam, the thirty-eight-year-old Degauque intended to kill American troops, although she was the only one who died. Her attack marked the first time a Western woman had been successfully recruited for an operation in Iraq.
On the same day, an Iraqi woman whose brothers died fighting for al-Qaeda entered a wedding party in Amman, Jordan, to commit a deadly attack. Al-Qaeda sent a four-person team into Jordan from Iraq to target hotels frequented by Westerners, which included the Radisson, the Hyatt, and Days Inn. Sajida Al-Rishawi and her husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, took cabs to the Radisson, wearing clothes fit for a wedding reception. Under her dress, Al-Rishawi had on an explosives belt with ball bearings, suggesting that she intended to inflict the largest number of casualties. Jordan’s then– deputy prime minister, Marwan Muasher, told a press conference that the husband-and-wife hit team “entered the wedding hall. She pulled the detonator and it didn’t go off. Her husband forced her to leave the hotel and then he blew himself up.” The Radisson terrorist attack killed more than thirty civilians.
Al-Rishawi became the first Iraqi woman arrested for an unsuccessful bombing. Days later, she appeared on Jordanian state television and confessed to her crime. “In Jordan, we rented an apartment. [My husband] had two explosives belts. He put one on me and wore the other. He taught me how to use it, how to pull the cord and operate it,” she said in Arabic. Al-Rishawi described the plan: how she would enter the hotel, moving to one corner while her husband went to another area.
She continued, “My husband executed the attack. I tried to detonate and it failed. I left. People started running and I started running with them.” Later, Al-Rishawi retracted her confession and appealed her death sentence. Behind bars, she was forgotten until nearly ten years later, when ISIS demanded her release in exchange for Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh, whom they had captured in Syria. The trade between the female operative and the pilot ended badly. When Jordan refused to swap Al-Rishawi, ISIS set the pilot on fire inside a steel cage. The barbaric act, which aired on television, horrified the Muslim and Western worlds. Beheadings, kidnappings, and ransom were common terrorist tactics, but burning a person alive was a gruesome and grisly act that had never been tried before. Al-Kasasbeh’s burning led Jordan to execute Al-Rishawi by hanging on February 4, 2015.
The anomaly of female terrorists in Iraq confused security forces, including American authorities, because suicide attacks by women occurred randomly. In 2006, there were no attacks by women, even though male operatives continued to strike and kill American and Iraqi targets. Because attacks by women seemed rare—and were underreported and unprecedented—the world community didn’t pay much attention to women in al-Qaeda.
But everything changed in 2007. In a lecture I gave at Columbia University, and later in Paris, I explained that male terrorists were increasing their efforts to recruit women to plan and perpetrate attacks. This move was both strategic and tactical—men could ensure the longevity of the terror organization by including women; and men could guarantee their own survival (i.e., avoid an arrest and death by authorities) when women were sent to strike the enemy targets. Bringing women into al-Qaeda helped the organization strike softer civilian targets as well as the predictable military targets. That year, there were at least six deadly attacks by women. In February, a woman detonated near a Shia college. Two months later, a female suicide bomber targeted police recruits, killing almost twenty officers. In the summer, a female bomber killed two policemen at a checkpoint. In the winter, a female attacker injured seven American soldiers near a military patrol; another attacker detonated near a police patrol, wounding five policemen; a female operative targeted the offices of a Sunni anti–al-Qaeda organization, killing fifteen people. All of the attacks took place in the Sunni triangle, an area in central Iraq near the capital city of Baghdad.
In 2008, the number of female bombers entered the double digits and included targets in the north, south, and west of Iraq. In most cases, there was little information about the identities and background of the female bomber and only more questions. Was she abused? Did someone force her? Was she raped or drugged? Who was her handler? With sketchy details of the female bombers, women became data points rather than human beings with a personal story that could explain why they had joined or been forced into violent extremism.
In 2008, three years after predicting the rise of female bombers, I published a piece in Newsweek titled “Dressed to Kill: Why the Number of Female Suicide Bombers Is Rising in Iraq.”1 Terrorism experts and security forces needed answers to explain the unusual upward trend. My explanation was simple: “As more men are captured or killed by security forces worldwide, it was inevitable that terror groups would consider other options to keep their cause alive.” Violent men recognized that a Muslim woman has the ability to deceive, disguise, and destroy the enemy. Only a woman, in traditional or modern dress, can dupe men. She is capable of the greatest deception, using her gender to appear harmless and a victim of violence.
Many women are victims of the brutality of war, but in this case, women also became the victimizers, a term I borrowed from Dr. Mia Bloom, a terrorism scholar and friend. In a May 2007 article from eJournal USA, “Women as Victims and Victimizers,” Bloom states that the ultimate goal of violent women is “to foster fear and uncertainty beyond the immediate victims by destroying lives and property in hopes of causing greater long-term costs.”2 Therefore, like men, women are capable of punishing or discriminating against another group, and killing is often the manner in which a female terrorist strikes at a sacrificial victim, which is exactly the definition of a victimizer. Bloom and I knew that women have a clear tactical advantage: by concealing their bombs under the long, loosely fitted abaya, women can blow themselves up almost anywhere. Therefore, the female bombers of Iraq fit the Three Cs framework. The local context and culture of Iraq at the time of war made it easy for women to join al-Qaeda and, later, ISIS. As bombers under the veil, women also proved to be highly capable, which gave extremist men a clear advantage.
In five years, Al-Zarqawi had managed to persuade a number of Muslim women to join him and al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In his organization, females played a unique and never-before-seen role: to build a bomb, hide a bomb, or put one on. His primary goal had been to keep the men alive and ensure al-Qaeda’s survival. For years, the use of female suicide terrorists ebbed and flowed, but the attacks and casualties that women inflicted on Iraq were enough to keep the world watching.
For US forces deployed in Iraq, the challenge of tracking female terrorists was enormous. A US Marine officer serving in Fallujah—a hotbed of extremist activity and sectarian strife—said to me, “If we are told by our superiors not to look at a woman because Arab culture tells us not to, then how are we supposed to suspect them?” Because women were seen as invisible non-state actors—they are independent of an established institution and act independently— the task of countering the threat of female terrorists was arguably greater than marginalizing al-Qaeda’s men in Iraq. US authorities recognized that the anonymity of the female bomber protected her personal identity, making detection nearly impossible.
Not knowing the identities of female bombers in Iraq raised a number of security problems. If authorities do not know the names or faces of women who have committed attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, how can authorities counter the new threat? Is there a way to use deception to fight deception? The classic research question pulled me into the vast literature on deception as a common tactic used in warfare.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb deceive as “to cause to believe what is false.” The female bombers of Iraq mastered this skill. With a suicide belt hidden under their veils, women achieved two goals: they played into the stereotype steeped in Arab and Muslim culture that frames women as “the weaker sex” and victims of war, and they proved to be valuable operatives when they successfully exploded bombs hidden underneath their loose clothing. Therefore, men encouraged Muslim girls and women to join their group, setting a new cultural trend in motion and proving once again that culture trumps religion.
Since December 2007, attacks conducted by women have accounted for 36 percent, or five out of nineteen, of all suicide operations. During this time, I began to receive emails from US commanders in Iraq who were trying to understand the acts of violence by women and numerous calls by the media to explain the erratic behavior of al-Qaeda’s women. A senior US Army officer involved with intelligence operations in Diyala, a restive province known for its orange trees, wrote to me in an email, “We have never viewed females with the same lethality as we would a male. And because of that cultural sensitivity on our part, it has made the female a very valuable tool of the insurgent.” No doubt, Muslim cultural norms and tribal traditions protected women from becoming victims of violence. And often, men responded to war, not women, whom they viewed as their honor.
In an unclassified email from Iraq, US Army Major Garcia listed some observations about female suicide bombers. Given the difficult task of pinpointing specific characteristics of these people, the average demographics of known women involved in suicide operations for al-Qaeda in Iraq are generally as follows:
Younger females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.
Childless widows of AQI members who were martyred by ISF (international security forces) and want to exact revenge against the responsible organization.
Younger females who are not able to succeed in society or are maintained in an institution (mental hospital) without direct contact with family members.
50 INVISIBLE MARTYRS
Young females who are brainwashed by daily AQI propaganda and a skewed interpretation of religious scriptures.
Younger females with families (husband, children) who are coerced by AQI with compensation for their families.
According to this list, potential female recruits for al-Qaeda are young, widowed, or mentally ill. Suicide terrorism may have filled a void in their lives. But time has disproved the belief that only young females are attracted to male-dominated terrorist groups. In Iraq and in other conflicts, older women—married and with children— have joined violent groups. Age is not a predictable identifier for female terrorists.
If age does not matter, being a widow does. A US officer, who wished to be unidentified, told me of his experiences with widows who had bombs. “This weekend, we had two in Baquba [a city northeast of Baghdad in Diyala Province] . . . one [woman] wearing a vest that was stopped by a Son of Iraq when she was attempting to get into an area where a meeting was being held, which was followed five minutes later by another female driving a suicide car bomb less than four hundred meters away targeting first responders.”
The stereotype of Muslim women as innocent and inactive participants of war changed the gender perception held by US soldiers and Iraqi forces that women could be female bombers. In 2008, the true-life stories of two different females—a child bomber and an older woman—showed that women could be more destructive than men. On average, they killed four times more people than male operatives. Women could have greater propaganda value when they shamed men and other women into joining al-Qaeda. And female bombers made for compelling news and international headlines because violence by women was a relatively new trend with varying conclusions.
In those early days, I told media outlets that women chose suicide terrorism for the same reasons as men. Many women expressed personal grievances against enemy forces; and family ties helped women enter terrorist organizations, a point that seemed obvious to me after looking at secular independence movements that often accepted female relatives of male leaders or operatives. Why should the role of Muslim women be any different from that of other women? I thought.
In a special feature for Al Jazeera English, I simplified the reason that women joined terror groups: Women used violence as a way to protest the breakdown of their social structures in war. Women protested the loss of their husbands, homes, and honor. Mothers felt the need to avenge the loss of their sons, for example. One Iraqi woman said, “There is no greater bond than a mother with her son. When her son is threatened, captured, or killed by security forces, then she has no reason to live. We take revenge by committing suicide attacks.” Another said, “US troops destroyed my life, killed thousands of Iraqis, and have support from many who also are betrayers. I lost my children and husband, and have no reason to be in this world anymore.”
Other women protested the devastating human rights conditions in Iraq since the 2003 war. In her book City of Widows, Iraqi journalist and activist Haifa Zangana wrote, “The Iraq war is a war against women.”3 An Iraqi woman I met after she escaped to the United States told me about a sniper who nearly killed her in 2006. “But because it was not my hour of death, I moved my head and the bullet passed by my ear,” she said. This same woman told me about her neighbor in Baghdad taken by insurgents from a street corner. “She was raped and then dropped at the same spot where she was kidnapped. She is forever shamed,” she said. Countless stories of Iraqi women trapped between al-Qaeda and security forces helped explain why some chose violence as an alternative to shame and a senseless death.
My research has shown that the primary individual motivation for women is personal: the protection of family, community, and country in order to bring about meaningful change to conflict. Studies of women in secular pan-Arab movements showed that women helped their men succeed: they collected funds, cooked and distributed food to soldiers, and published propaganda in their homes; some joined men in military combat. Female activists like Zangana believe that women in national movements liberate themselves by fighting alongside men. In the 1990s, before religious terrorism was a global threat, I studied the women of Algeria who fought in the Battle of Algiers to oppose French colonial rule. These women were instrumental to the war in 1958–1964 but returned to their homes after the independence of the Algerian state. Thus, women determined to change their community and country with violent action soon realized that their participation had no effect on empowering their gender.
Furthermore, Muslim women today often cite the early examples of female fighters but misplace their own struggles within a historical narrative that fails to explain contextual pressures, a term coined by Dr. Karla Cunningham that refers to the impact of domestic and international enforcement, conflict, and social dislocation. In the early battles, Muslim women did not enjoy equal status with men until a woman from the Quraysh aristocracy, Umm Salama, one day asked the Prophet, “Why are men mentioned in the Quran and why are we not?” Her reply came in the form of a verse: “Lo! Men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender to Allah, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey, and women who obey. . . . Allah hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.”4 This verse alone revolutionized the Muslim community, illuminating a break with pre-Islamic practices, and called into question the customs that ruled relations between the sexes.
The unintentional debate that women in conflict arouse is plastic; no conflict today has elevated the status of the Muslim woman or attempted to address the societal and religious norms that solidify the role of the Muslim woman. While her participation in suicide attacks serves the overall group or social movement, her individual contribution is seldom recognized, except in martyrdom fests where female bombers are deemed necessary for operational and strategic adaptation against a well-armed adversary. In other cases, women are expendable and a riding wave of al-Qaeda’s success, a point I have made in lectures delivered at home and at international events. Their recruitment by men and other women makes them victims of violence. In some cases, these females are manipulated, trapped by the terror organization to do its dirty work. With no place to go, exploited females are pawns of delusion and deceit.
In August 2008, in the city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, in Diyala Province, a young female bomber stumbled along a dusty street in an oversized blue dress with pink and yellow flowers along the front border, her wavy brown hair covered in a black hijab. She had one task: go near the police checkpoint and detonate the bomb under her abaya. But the sixteen-year-old Rania Ibrahim couldn’t do it. One year later, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for an attempted suicide attack.
Iraqi police released a video of Ibrahim, tied to a black steel bracket alongside a dirt road with the sun in her eyes as male officers cut off the multiple wires of the detonator that attached around her waist. Some say Ibrahim was drugged, which explained why she looked distracted, distressed, and disturbed.
The acting police chief, General Abdul Karim Khalaf, instructed an Iraqi police cameraman to capture the unstrapping of the female bomber, aired on Iraqi television, using a long metal pointer to show exactly what happened to the girl that the police discovered. As they detached the suicide vest packed with eighteen kilograms of explosives, men in police uniforms wearing helmets and bulletproof vests did what was unthinkable in a conservative Muslim society: they treated the young would-be suicide bomber like an exhibit to gain international attention and approval. One journalist told me that she believed Iraqi authorities had Ibrahim filmed before and after her arrest, including hours that she remained in police custody, as evidence of Iraq’s ability to disrupt al-Qaeda. The police parade of Ibrahim may have been intended to alert the world community that local security forces could contain the threat of suicide terrorism.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The statement that Ibrahim gave while in police custody revealed a network of other women with violent ambitions. She told the police that a relative had put the vest on her. She was told to wait outside for further instructions. She did not know what was happening to her. The details of Ibrahim’s early life helped explain why she was an “unwilling suicide bomber,” a description used by the US military.
There are varying accounts of what may have caused Ibrahim to not pull the wire. What we do know is this: she was born into a poor Sunni family; she left school when she was eleven years old; five months before her arrest, she was married to an al-Qaeda man in his twenties, whose own mother and aunt were members of the violent organization. Ibrahim was fifteen when her terrorist husband encouraged her to strap on the bomb. “We’ll meet in Heaven,” he said to her.
Ibrahim was smart when she staggered along the dust-filled road, calling attention to herself from the police manning a checkpoint. Perhaps it was her outsized and baggy abaya, too bulky for a girl of her small size. Or it could have been her half-conscious state that caused the police to question where she was going. Whatever it was, Ibrahim “saved” herself from dying, at least for a few hours more, until she would be sent to an Iraqi prison, where girls and women are often abused, raped, and tortured.
In conflicts around the world, men manipulate underage girls. But in Ibrahim’s case, it was the women in her family who were the abusers: women with a political agenda or a personal vendetta. And the young Ibrahim was their redemption.
I learned about her arrest from Anita McNaught, the first Western journalist to gain access to Iraq’s youngest female terrorist. I remember the morning that McNaught called me on a satellite phone. I had made another round of chai and stood in my kitchen. My kids were in school, and aside from the woodpecker outside, I reveled in the sound of silence. But that phone call changed everything I thought I knew about female bombers in the Islamic world.
“She did not want to kill anyone,” McNaught said to me, confident that the young girl sitting on the rug in front of her was not interested in al-Qaeda. McNaught was not alone with the failed suicide bomber. In her personal notes, which she titled “On the Sofa With a Human Bomb,” she wrote,
When I reached the office of the Police Chief, the frenzy was only starting. There was palpable excitement in the corridors. When the officers opened the door, we almost fell in. We were the first press, and the only Western media present. And the Acting Chief of Police was absolutely delighted with what his men had sprung him that day. Over the course of the next two hours, the room filled with Iraqi journalists, photographers and video cameras. It was a circus.5
McNaught shared the room with Iraqi police interrogators, interpreters, and her own camera crew, trying to grasp how Ibrahim had strapped on the bomb. According to her story, the young girl’s in-laws placed the vest around her waist. The wires alarmed her, she said. The women ordered Ibrahim to take the suicide vest to her mother’s home.
A female police officer leaned in to ask Ibrahim an ironic question. “So, you were taking it to your mother’s so she could blow herself up?” McNaught said the girl took little notice of the officer.
She described the failed bomber as street-savvy. She had “a self-possession beyond her years. She was nervous . . . she chewed her bottom lip. But she met your gaze strongly and managed a wry smile. She handled a burgeoning Iraqi media scrum in the police chief’s office with some dignity and when pressed by various inter-locutors, pushed back crossly. Still, she gave little away—and even less that would implicate her in the planned murder in which she was intended to play a central role.”
The real perpetrators were Ibrahim’s mother, aunt, and sister-in-law. All Ibrahim had to do was transport the suicide vest, and she hoped that her mother “would sort out the problem for her— perhaps by taking the vest to that very same checkpoint and turn it in.” The Arabic-language newspaper Dar Al-Hayat reported that Major General Abd al-Kareem Khalaf, the commander of central operations at the Ministry of Interior and acting Baquba police commander, said the girl’s mother was caught at home with an explosive vest and the girl’s husband ran away.
McNaught told me that Ibrahim had no intention of hurting innocent people but was just the kind of female recruit that al-Qaeda looked for: She was young. She had little to no economic or social capital. She had a minimal education. She was born a Sunni Muslim and poor. Looking into Ibrahim’s background, I felt a hollowness inside as if something were missing, something I could not name. The girl that al-Qaeda chose as their next victim wanted more for her life than an explosion. “It sounded to me that she had grown up in an environment where the dividing line between what you lived for and what you died for had become very blurred,” McNaught told me. Ibrahim lived in a house with more than one suicide vest lying around. When police entered the house, they arrested the sisters-in-law and found another suicide vest.
During her arrest, Ibrahim told reporters that her father and elder brother had been kidnapped and murdered by military men in the past year. For the young girl, death had been normalized and suicide was a desired act rewarded by Paradise. But there was nothing conventional about suicide terrorism for Ibrahim. Her story revealed the ugly truth of al-Qaeda’s strategy: the group snared girls and women into its dungeon of violence because it could.
On camera, the young would-be suicide bomber appeared unusually composed. McNaught was surprised at how confident Ibrahim seemed after having been publicly shamed as men removed her dress to deactivate the bomb, how calm she was when she was seated on a worn rug swarmed by journalists at the police station hours after her arrest. I considered for a moment that the illiterate girl might have believed she was free from the attack that would have ended her life. But she may not have considered what would happen next. Time spent in an Iraqi prison would not heal Ibrahim but might scar her—male police officers used rape to dishonor and disgrace female prisoners. “She may be better off dead,” an Iraqi expert told me.
McNaught’s description of Ibrahim’s tragedy—a girl forced to put on a suicide vest by her own family—highlights the importance of relationships. In researching the lives of female terrorists, I have come to the following conclusion: most girls and women lost close male relatives; they lived under radical teachings dictated by violent men or women; and girls may have no control over their own lives, including the choice of marriage. Ibrahim may have been too young and naïve to have rebelled against her family. What could she have done? I thought. It was unclear whether she wanted to run away; if she had, where could she have gone in war-torn Iraq? Who would protect her? In many cases, girls have no option except to obey the orders of their elders.
While Ibrahim did not choose the violent path, other women entered terrorism willingly. Psychologists point to certain event factors to explain why and how some girls and women self-select for suicide operations. Trauma is a key motivator that is determined by the following: the level of exposure a female has to a violent event; her age at the time of the event; being a victim of multiple traumatic incidents; the duration of the trauma; the existence of an ongoing threat that the trauma will continue; and so on. Suicide terrorism is a choice that is explained by feelings of helplessness; a tendency toward risk-taking; and an intense anger, resulting in harm to others as well as self-harm. My mentor Dr. Post has spent a lifetime examining what lies behind the behavior of suicide terrorists.
In our conversations, I have learned to accept that each woman’s story is unique and to be willing to say, “Who knows?” when asked about motive for every female who has committed a violent act. As novelist D. H. Lawrence said, the soul is a dark forest.
When I was in my twenties, barely intelligent enough to pursue the study of terrorism, I learned the danger of fragmentation. Canadian adventure writer Robert Young Pelton, who risks his life to find the truth in internecine wars, reminded me that the female terrorist is more than a news story. Her flirtation with death and strange infatuation with violence is more than grist for a Hollywood thriller. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my gurus, it’s that the seemingly seductive lives of female terrorists are closer to mundane accounts of repugnant psychopaths; only in recent years have females, the object of swooning attention by the international community, left their homes on a forbidden passionate adventure, the Western girls of ISIS among them.
Perhaps they believe that their love for martyrdom—the kill perceived as the ultimate individual choice made by women— will allow them to translate their anger into so-called meaningful action. They choose the right to die, to attain spiritual reward, a general vulgarity disguised as divine intervention. Over time, the stories of female bombers, including those who have failed, are confined in a living anthology and become the subject of television.
The more I looked at Ibrahim, the more I came to believe that saying no to her young terrorist husband had not been an option. For most females drawn or forced into violent groups, there is no turning back. They join violent men to fulfill their own personal desire for marriage and to satisfy the need for change, the result of which is the opposite of change: more violence leading to a cycle of carnage. For some women, the pursuit of violence is explained by raw revenge rather than an affirmation of faith.
An imprisoned Iraqi would-be suicide bomber, Baida Abdul Karim al-Shammari, the mother of two boys and a girl, said in an interview that she was ready to “explode [the Americans] because they are invaders and blasphemers and Jewish. I will explode them first because . . . they feel free to take our lands.” Al-Shammari’s motive was simple: “to take revenge on her brothers’ killers— American soldiers,” reported Alissa J. Rubin in the New York Times. The would-be bomber also remembered the shooting of a neighbor in the back of the neck by the US military in 2005. “I saw him running toward them, and then they shot him in the neck. I still see him. . . . I saw him clawing on the ground in the dust before his soul left his body. After that I began to help with making improvised explosive devices.”6 Al-Shammari and Ibrahim shared a jail cell after their arrests in Baquba, forty miles northeast of Baghdad, Iraq’s segregated capital city.
Religious-inspired terrorism lives in a permanent contradiction: its idea of Islam as the solution is a sacred value, yet its vision of violence in the name of God entails its transformation into a political belief that delights in evil for its own sake. The image and perception of female terrorists as frighteningly cold and conscienceless offers no meaning or understanding. Rather, it creates distance and distrust, which makes studying the actions and motivations of these women and girls nearly impossible. As a researcher, I had to separate the distorted faith preached by extremists from the peaceful practice of Islam in order to understand that some women and girls don’t act in the name of religion at all. It is the male terrorist who uses scripture to achieve a political end. Except that in this case, Ibrahim and Al-Shammari didn’t join al-Qaeda for political or religious reasons.
It was personal. Ibrahim’s Aunt Wijdan recruited females. Her father and brother were found making bombs for al-Qaeda. They used Ibrahim for a suicide mission, and the young girl said she hadn’t known. There are conflicting reports about Ibrahim’s intention to kill or not to kill. Her cellmate, Al-Shammari, believed that the young girl knew exactly what she was doing. When she was outfitted with the suicide vest, Ibrahim claimed that “there were red wires, but I didn’t know what was inside it.” Although Ibrahim appeared untrained for suicide, Al-Shammari was prepared. Dubbed the “bad mother,” she helped make bombs, buying wires and other parts. “We are doing it for God’s sake. We are doing it as jihad,” she told the Times. Both women had married young, and in Al-Shammari’s case, her husband regularly beat her. As of this writing, their husbands are believed to be dead.
Around the same time, Iraqi police arrested Samira Ahmed Jassim, a prime terrorist recruiter of Iraqi girls and women. The arrest of Jassim in January 2009 was a breakthrough for Iraqi authorities, who had begun to realize the gravity of women’s roles in terrorist groups. Nicknamed “Mother of the Believers” or Umm al-Mumineen, Jassim had recruited eighty women as suicide operatives, twenty-eight of whom had launched successful attacks. A spokesman for Baghdad operations, Kassem Atta, confirmed that Jassim belonged to the terrorist group Ansar al Sunna, taking orders from a Muslim cleric through an intermediary named Shaker. Her primary role was to encourage vulnerable females to carry out attacks.
In pictures, Jassim looked to be around fifty, her hair and body covered in all-black fabric. In a filmed confession, Jassim described the recruitment process: she found girls who had been traumatized by the war, rape victims, females with family problems, and/or those with signs of depression. Her first female recruit, Um Huda, detonated in a police station in Makdadia, located northeast of Baghdad; her second recruit was an old, unmarried woman who exploded in the same city; and so on. After Jassim’s arrest, Iraqi and American authorities began to recognize that women played a vital role in violent groups. Without them, I argue, male-dominated groups could not survive.
Outside of operations, females are chief propagandists. After a drone strike killed Al-Zarqawi in 2006, his wife, Umm Muhammad, posted a communiqué online calling on all Muslim men to avenge the death of her husband. “We are all Zarqawi,” she wrote. It was her way of shaming other Muslim men, those not yet in arms, and to seek worldwide support for the men dedicated to destroying the West and its allies. Three years later, Umayma Hasan, the wife of the former al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, released a letter identifying three kinds of Muslim women: fighters, sisters in Islam in prison, and the rest. She wrote, “I will advise my Muslim sisters to impart in their sons the love of jihad and the will to serve it.” Before her, in the late 1980s, the wife of al-Qaeda’s spiritual guide, Abdullah Azzam, wrote in her memoir, “I ask my Muslim sisters to encourage their husbands and sons to continue with the jihad.”
As war raged on in Iraq, ISIS besieged Fallujah in January 2014 and captured Mosul and Tikrit a few months later. The group’s swift expansion of power and territory bolstered al-Baghdadi, who followed al-Zarqawi’s example by welcoming women into its global movement. ISIS needed wives and mothers. Only a few would take up arms.
ISIS calls on women from all countries to join its post-national, post-racial community structured on an unreal version of Islam. American Muslim scholar Haroon Moghul denounced ISIS as anything but Muslim. “Its relationship to Islam is like Frankenstein to a human being, or a zombie to a living person,” he told CNN. Violent extremists like ISIS violate Islamic history and theology. They pervert the Prophetic model from seventh-century Arabia in which Muhammad called for peace, love, and mercy, rather than war, hate, and intolerance.
Islamic or not, ISIS portrays itself as an equal opportunity organization. Male recruiters prey on females online and offline, encouraging participation as protectorates of the new state. The females of ISIS offer the same emotional, spiritual, and physical support to their men. By joining, women belong to a collective identity that promises them pride and purpose. They share men’s personal and political reasons to kill the enemy. More important, women lead by example, encouraging other females to commit to the group’s ideological fervor, organizational goals, and national ambition.
Today, the women of ISIS are like al-Qaeda: they are calculated, committed, and compassionate toward the group and its objectives. The modern muhajiraat, or migrants, are equally deceptive in their Western clothing, accents, and upbringing. But once assimilated into ISIS territory, women lose their individuality; they are unrecognizable in all-black robes, gloves, and matching fabric over their faces. To the outside world, the females have disappeared, forever lost to an uncertain future governed by men with guns. As Western women began to leave for Syria, I considered for a moment. Will they be happy in their new home? We know from multiple media reports, Twitter accounts, and ongoing data collection that the women of Raqqa have mixed emotions about their new roles and responsibilities.
Whatever their role, this is a threat we can’t ignore. Without women, ISIS or any other violent group will not survive. Without female recruits, ISIS cannot call for a Caliphate. No Muslim community is made by men, alone. If only women could see that joining violent groups guarantees a chaotic present, rather than a promising future. What these girls do not know is that the fantasy and friendship they desire from radicals in Islam could lead to danger and death.