The Growing Role of Women in Jihadi Terrorism

The television screen blinked rapidly, sending a stream of words almost too quickly to read across the blue ribbon at the bottom of the broadcast. Standing before the television in my Halloween costume, I tried to process the words that were in front of me. Several phrases jumped out at me. TERRORIST ATTACK. 8 DEAD, 11 INJURED. SUSPECT IN CRITICAL CONDITION. Over and over again, those words raced across the screen, bringing with them a sickening sense of fear which settled in my stomach. An image appeared on the screen, momentarily covering the line of blue tape. My stomach dropped. I knew exactly where the attack occurred; right by the Hudson River, steps away from the high school I had just applied to attend. It was October 31, 2017, and Sayfullo Saipov had just killed eight people along the West Side Highway “in the name of Allah.”

Saipov was not the first Islamic extremist to commit a terrorist attack, and nor was he the last. He was a classic example of a jihadi terrorist—a person who subscribes to a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and who believes that violent action is necessary to rid the world of non-believers. Whether it be ISIS claiming responsibility for Omar Mateen’s shooting of 49 people at a Florida nightclub, or Al-Qaeda on 9/11, jihadi groups continue to terrorize civilians across the nation and across the world, creating a widespread culture of fear and paranoia.

As the problem of jihadism grows ever larger in significance and danger, it also evolves. One recent evolution is the emergence of female terrorists on the enemy lines of the war on terror.The jihadi movement has long since been a patriarchal one, placing an emphasis on the actions of men as opposed to those of women. The role of women in jihadi organizations has traditionally been limited as a result of the jihadi interpretation of the Koran. There are multiple verses in the Koran that can be interpreted to mean that the woman is inferior to the man in a relationship. This leads to the expectation that jihadi-involved women remain at home and take on domestic duties. Older doctrines expected women to raise their children and instill in them the ideas of Islamic extremism while educating them on their religion. They were not expected to be involved in combat and were generally prohibited from recruiting other jihadis or from plotting attacks. Yet, jihadi women have increasingly taken a more visible and involved role in the Islamist terrorism plaguing the world.

The first recorded female Islamic extremist attack occurred in January 2002. It was orchestrated by Wafa Iris, a 28-year-old woman who was born and raised in a refugee camp as a staunch supporter of Palestine. Iris was responsible for a suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem that killed one man and wounded many others. Though it is suspected that Iris was more motivated by nationalism than by religious fervor, she supported Hamas, a Palestinian party considered by many analysts to be an extremist group due to its use of military force against Israel. After Iris’s attack, more and more women became involved in Islam-inspired terrorism. By 2003, Hamas and Palestinian jihadist forces had begun regularly using female bombers, as they were able to avoid the Israeli security measures usually were reserved for men. Women have recently begun to play a large role in Boko Haram, a jihadi terrorist group based in Nigeria, which exploited the advantages of using women as terrorists to great effect. Out of 434 suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram between April 2011 and June 2017, at least 56 percent were women, making it the terrorist group with the highest proportion of women involved in military pursuits.

This problem may seem to be one that only affects the Middle East and Africa. However, the threat is far closer than we realize, as female extremists have begun to pop up in Western nations. The most notable examples of women involved with jihadi terrorists come from France, a country that has been recently plagued with a number of devastating terrorist attacks. Over the span of three months in 2016, three terrorist-related incidents were planned by radicalized women. The first was a parked car stuffed with gas canisters set to explode a few blocks away from Notre Dame Cathedral. The two perpetrators, Inès Madani and Ornella Gilligmann, had recently been sentenced to 25 to 30 years in prison. The second was a plot to attack a Parisian train, and the third was the planned recruitment of two young adults by a woman with known relations to ISIS. It is only a matter of time before terrorist plots such as these succeed; the evolving nature of jihadi terrorism places nations across the world in ever-greater danger.

Many women in America have also been involved with ISIS since 2011. Though many leave to become “ISIS brides”—women who marry members of ISIS in order to gain security, money, and status—some women have been taking on roles usually associated with men. One such example is Samantha Elhassani, a former U.S. citizen who has been accused of aiding and abetting individuals involved with ISIS by giving them material support. Elhassani, born in Indiana, met her husband Moussa in July 2012 and moved to Syria, where he served as an ISIS sniper. After Moussa was killed in 2017, Elhassani and her four children were taken into custody by the Kurds and extradited to the U.S., where Elhassani is currently awaiting trial.

There are also many women involved in counterterrorism efforts throughout the Middle East, particularly in Kurdistan (an unofficial region in Northern Syria and Iraq dominated by Kurdish peoples). It is estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the Kurdish counterterrorist forces are women. Many of them are devout followers of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, and take his words literally: “The land cannot be free when women are not free.”

The rise of women in non-traditional roles in Islamic extremism and non-extremism calls into question the cultural standards that have long been in place in these societies. Female jihadis must be acknowledged as being just as dangerous, if not more so, than male terrorists. In a post-9/11 global society, this is not a threat to be taken lightly. It is clear that our counter-terrorism efforts must shift to accommodate this new threat. The stereotype that women do not commit terrorist attacks or are not dangerous on the battlefield must be abandoned immediately, and women should be more involved in Western counterterrorism efforts just as they are in Kurdistan. If this issue is addressed while still in relative infancy, it can be stopped before it grows into a threat just as dangerous as any which have arisen in the devastating, global war on terror.