Dr. Bahaa Helmy Writes: The Women of ISIS Are a Greater Danger to Europe

After the Islamic State organization (ISIS) received painful blows in 2014 in the framework of the war on terrorism and the confrontation of its sources of financing, the weakening of its capabilities and resources, and its loss of control over its areas of influence.

The organization’s leaders turned towards using the women who had joined it, after it came to consider them a basic pillar of the organization’s success; they were trained in leadership and confrontation using weapons, or in working as lone wolves, and in recruiting European young men and women through social media.

It is an intellectual, strategic and qualitative development in the use of the women of ISIS in fighting, to make up for the loss of its men and equipment destroyed in this war.

Whereas the role of women in the organization had been limited to sexual jihad, which took several forms: the first, forced sex with females – of all ages – as captives or prisoners, considered a lawful right of the men; the second, by buying them as slaves in the ISIS markets before its collapse; and the third form, sex with girls from Europe and the West who had been recruited to entertain the organization’s fighters by practising vice for a material wage, prostitution being one of the means of income.

Their role soon developed from raising children and bringing them up on the principles, values and ideology of the organization to prepare them as future fighters, alongside preaching and caring for the families of the dead and the prisoners. To their participation in the women’s morality police groups in ISIS, monitoring their fellow women and punishing them with flogging for not adhering to the sharia dress or walking without a mahram.. etc.

When the organization was defeated, it described them as the free women of Mesopotamia and gave them legitimacy to take part in suicide operations and blow themselves up, and demanded that they incite their sons and push them into the battles in support of their ideas and the caliphate state.

This approach differs in some way from that of al-Qaeda, which limited the role of women to the traditional roles of caring for the family and raising a new generation of mujahideen; but ISIS was a pioneer in exploiting and using women in all the work of the organization, and in their involvement in practising extremism in the forms and shapes of prostitution, killing and revenge, and in their acquiring the skills of fighting, concealment, camouflage and recruitment relying on emotional methods and pleas for protection through means of electronic communication, as well as their carrying out money transfers to areas in Syria and Turkey to finance terrorist operations.

The Global Terrorism Index 2019 points to the increasing participation of women in terrorist and suicide operations, the growing seriousness of the problem of the return of foreign terrorist fighters, and that there are tens of thousands of women and children in prisons in northern Syria under the protection of the Kurdish forces.

Considering the new legal measures and security policies followed by the European countries to protect against the danger of the Brotherhood organization and extremist organizations, in line with the European Union’s 2020 counter-terrorism strategy, and the uncovering of many crimes of money laundering and terrorist financing launched from European territory, together with the detection in 2020 of a number of electronic media outlets belonging to those organizations calling for terrorist attacks against the Crusader enemies and their helpers under the slogan (Be a lone wolf), Europe needs to take measures of caution and care and intelligence cooperation, while monitoring incitement to violence and extremism on social media, given the possibility of new retaliatory terrorist acts against the innocent, in order to protect them and protect human rights from those predatory wolves.