the limitations on their daily lives, the reports of what ISIS does to women in areas it captures are truly horrifying. Women kidnapped, raped, murdered, sold as slaves to fighters: the list goes on. Women are often taken and held as sex slaves or other roles when the men in a captured village or town are killed on the spot. The women targeted for such crimes are often non-Sunnis – Shi’a or Yazidi or Christian perhaps – but in some cases they may also include Sunnis who do not accept the extremist definitions of religion demanded by ISIS. In November 2014 CBS News reported an assault on a Sunni tribe in Iraq, in Ras al-Maa, a village near Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, now largely controlled by ISIS. In that attack, a senior member of the local Sunni al-Bu Nimr tribe described how at least 50 people were lined up and shot, one by one, of whom four were children and six were women.
So the punishments unique to women – including rape and forced ‘marriage’ to ISIS fighters – are carried out even as women suffer the non-gender-specific attacks alongside men. Women, indeed whole families, become victims of kidnappings, are forced from their homes, and face the risks inherent in US and coalition air strikes and other attacks aimed at ISIS.
Unfortunately many of the atrocities committed specifically against women are more quantitatively than qualitatively different from misogynistic traditions still in practice in some areas where ISIS has established a base and elsewhere. Forced marriage, for example, including the marriage of young girls, is a widespread phenomenon in poor rural areas of several Arab, African, and Asian countries.
The period of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and its overthrow in the US invasion and occupation that began in October 2001, provides a useful model. Treatment of women under Taliban rule was abysmal: many schools shut down, girls forced to leave school, urban women forced out of many professions, violently enforced restrictions on women’s actions, autonomy, dress, and more. Many girls and women were forced into marriages against their will. The US justified much of its anti-Taliban military engagement in Afghanistan with the language of protecting Afghan women. But it turned out that many of the warlords who had fought and lost to the Taliban, and later came back to fight with the US against the Taliban, held medieval-era views of women’s role in society that were strikingly similar to those of the Taliban.
When the US imposed a modern, more or less gender-equality-based constitution and laws, life improved for a small sector of Afghan women – those in Kabul and the few other large cities. But for the majority of women in the country, things did not get better. Forced marriages were a longstanding custom in many regions of rural Afghanistan (where the vast majority of the population lived), and they did not disappear when the US and its chosen proxies overthrew the Taliban. In fact, anti-Taliban warlords known for committing atrocities at times ended up in powerful positions in post-Taliban Afghanistan, including in the US-backed government.
Aside from the direct attacks on women, ISIS restrictions on women in public life are severe, including limits on schooling, separation of the sexes, prohibitions on many areas of work. There is no question the actions of ISIS are brutal and misogynistic. But it is also true that with the announcement of the Islamic State as a ‘caliphate’, ISIS asserted the goal of building a fully Islamic society, requiring the involvement of whole families, including women and children.
That state-building project is one of the key distinctions between ISIS and other extremist Islamist organizations. Time magazine’s Vivienne Walt described how
in al-Qaeda’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, young armed men holed up on the battlefield far from their families. But in Syria ISIS aims to install a purist Islamic state – an entire new country – as its name denotes. And so ISIS fighters are looking to build lives that are far broader than fighting the war, ones in which they can come home after a day’s battle to a loving wife and children, and home-cooked meals. As such, recruiting women into ISIS is not simply about expanding the organization. It is the essential building block of a future society. ISIS members have said their women do not fight, but are there to help build the new society.
In fact there are reports of significant numbers of women fighting for ISIS, including in an entire separate battalion of women fighters. Writing in Foreign Affairs, UN gender and conflict analyst Nimmi Gowrinathan described women fighters in ISIS within the historical context of women fighters in other violent movements:
Living in deeply conservative social spaces, they faced constant threats to their ethnic, religious, or political identities – and it was typically those threats, rather than any grievances rooted in gender, that persuaded them to take up arms. ISIS’ particularly inhumane violence can obscure the fact that the conflict in Iraq is also rooted in identity: at its base, the fight is a sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, with several smaller minorities caught in between. It makes sense, therefore, that the all-female al-Khansaa Brigade of ISIS relies heavily on identity politics for recruitment, targeting young women who feel oppressed as Sunni Muslims. Indeed, anonymous fatwas calling for single women to join the fight for an Islamic caliphate have been attractive enough to draw women to ISIS from beyond the region.
Certainly the majority of people living in the so-called caliphate are local Iraqis or Syrians, held against their will by a violent movement controlling their villages or towns. But among those responding to ISIS recruiting efforts, the creation of the ‘caliphate’ as a physical place has drawn not only fighters but whole families to the territory under ISIS domination.
The Washington Post reported on how ISIS recruits families to its territory.
‘The more they are successful at creating a whole new society, the more they are able to attract entire families,’ said Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who has written extensively about women and terrorism. ‘It’s almost like the American dream, but the Islamic State’s version of it.’
In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s main stronghold, the extremists have established a clinic for pregnant women run by a female gynecologist trained in Britain. Boys attend school, studying almost exclusively religion, until they are 14, when they are expected to start fighting, [British analyst Melanie] Smith said. Girls stay in school until they are 18; their instruction is about the Qur’an and sharia law, as well as learning how to dress, keep house, cook, clean and care for men, all according to a strict Islamic code.
Bloom said the Islamic State also appeals to women by providing electricity, food and a salary of up to $1,100 per month – a huge sum in Syria – for each fighter’s family. The largesse is funded with money looted from banks, oil smuggling, kidnappings for ransom, and the extortion of truckers and others who cross Islamic State territory…
The United Nations has documented extreme brutality toward women by Islamic State radicals, including reports of women, particularly from minority groups, being stoned to death or sold into prostitution or sex slavery for its fighters.
But the Islamic State uses family imagery in its aggressive and highly polished online recruiting on social media, including videos showing fighters pushing children on swings and passing out toys, and children playing on bouncy castles and bumper cars, riding ponies, and eating pink cotton candy.
Certainly ISIS will not be able to maintain the reality of those illusory descriptions. But understanding the various reasons why some women might choose to support ISIS – the search for identity, wanting a sectarian or religious life, a sense of political or economic dispossession – remains as important in challenging ISIS influence as is the need to grasp the depth of the organization’s attacks on women.
How did ISIS suddenly become so powerful? Why didn’t anyone see it coming?
In 2014 ISIS was not new. It had been around at least since 2004, and had claimed its
