By: Kathleen Wilson
Last week, Americans were shocked to learn that three Colorado teenage girls had stolen money from their parents and clandestinely bought plane tickets. Their destination: Syria. Their goal: to join ISIL.
The Colorado teens are not the only girls to have joined ISIL. Two Austrian girls, ages 15 and 17, recently moved to Syria, where they married ISIL militants and joined the movement. Nearly 100 French women and girls have also traveled to Syria to serve the militants, usually as wives or housekeepers.
Many worry that ISIL’s ability to attract young, foreign girls is indicative of its growing popularity and its strength as a terrorist organization. The organization uses tweets and blogs written by Western women married to ISIL fighters to persuade young women to travel to Syria and join their “sisters” as jihadi wives. Convincing or coercing young girls to leave their country to join a terrorist group is cause for concern. However, more concerning is the use of women not as wives or housekeepers for terrorists, but as terrorists themselves.
Islamic fundamentalist groups rarely recruit female fighters, closely adhering to society’s separation of genders. Since 1981, 85 percent of female suicide terrorists have been associated with secular organizations such as the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka or the Black Widows of Chechnya. Terrorist organizations that recruit women usually recruit them as suicide terrorists. This strategy is used for both personal and organizational reasons.
Author and scholar Mia Bloom argues in her book “Bombshell” that there are five main motivations for women to become suicide terrorists: revenge, redemption, relationship, respect, and rape. She argues that relationships are the most common reason for women’s recruitment; if they are in a relationship with a jihadi, they will be more likely to join the cause. Scholar Lindsey O’Rourke adds to Bloom’s list of motivations by calling on deviations from traditional gender norms. In societies where women are expected to get married and bear kids, divorced, widowed, raped, or infertile women may become suicide terrorists to gain respect and redemption.
Although women may become terrorist fighters for personal reasons, they also join for organizational reasons, as they can often increase the efficacy of a terrorist group. Though they only comprise 15 percent of all suicide bombers, women carry out 65 percent of assassinations. Pretending to be pregnant, female suicide terrorists can hide bombs under their garments without drawing any attention to themselves. A lack of female security personnel combined with conservative societies often prevents women from being heavily searched. Women raise fewer suspicions than the traditional image of the “bearded-male terrorist” and are able to draw closer to their target and create more casualties. They are simply more effective suicide terrorists than men.
While young women flying to Syria to join ISIL is a problem, these women usually serve in domestic roles. The media and the public should be more concerned about the increasing use of women as terrorist fighters, especially in Boko Haram, a Nigerian terrorist organization. Women perpetrated eight of Boko Haram’s recent suicide attacks and the organization is reported to have recruited over 150 girls under the age of 15 to fight. These girls, if used as suicide bombers, are far more dangerous than any ISIL wife.
