The Role of Women in Islamic State-led Terrorism

In August, a Jakarta court jailed 28-year-old Dian Yulia Novi for seven-and-a-half years for plotting to carry out a suicide attack outside the Presidential Palace during the changing of the guard, an event that is popular with tourists and locals. Novi, who is currently pregnant, admitted to the plot so the three judges did not heed the prosecution call for a 10 year sentence.

In 2014, IS established the Al-Khansa Brigade, with its own manifesto aimed at clarifying ‘the role of Muslim women and the life which is desired for them’ and ‘the realities of life and the hallowed existence of women in the Islamic State’. This force included at least 60 British women who often saw it as a form of female empowerment—‘jihadi girl power’—with four key themes.

The first is empowerment. IS claims that women in its caliphate have the possibility of becoming professionals such as doctors and nurses without fear of discrimination. A second theme is deliverance from the sin-filled western society that prevents women from living as true Muslims, and which discriminates against them when they want to live as Muslims. Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir?h, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly, stated that staying in a non-IS land was a sin because one was not living as a Muslim. The final two elements are participation and piety. IS claims that women play a crucial role in building the caliphate as, not only are they free to practice Islam, they can support their husbands and rear ‘lion cubs’.

The role of the brigade was as moral police able to punish women who didn’t abide by IS’s strict interpretation of Sharia law and to ensure that men in Raqqa joined IS. Those developments are important, as it appears that IS has changed its position on women, who were initially only permitted to marry IS fighters. IS’s vision had very defined roles for women and, when they did join the fight, they were often referred to as ‘supporters’. The theological basis for IS changing its position on  women as combatants remains a mystery. One explanation is that it has become necessary because of casualties incurred in the fighting.

An important issue is that counter-terrorism policies are largely geared towards addressing male terrorists rather than women. That begins with the popular assumption noted by Dr Mordechai Kedar, a senior lecturer in the department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University, who was injured when a Palestinian woman carried out a suicide attack on a bus he was travelling on. Women are not meant to blow themselves up, Dr Kedar said. They’re supposed to stay at home and give birth—‘preferably to boys’. Such thinking may explain why the US, after 9/11, adopted a special program under which extra scrutiny was applied to the visa applications of males between the ages of 16 and 45 who sought to enter the US.

With the loss of territory in Syria and Iraq, IS is adapting. That’s what terrorist groups do. The fact that around 20% of the 930 people who left Germany to join IS have been women, and that one-third of the French female recruits were converts, compared to one sixth of French males, highlights the depth of the problem. It’s important that, as our counterterrorism policies and CVE programs develop, we move away from stereotyping, as women are becoming important actors in the IS campaign. That demands that we rethink key elements of our tailored-for-men CVE programs.