1443447013 (N) by Mark Bourrie

Author:Mark Bourrie [Bourrie, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Canada
Published: 2016-01-19T22:00:00+00:00

ISIS’S ONLINE RECRUITERS TARGET WOMEN AS WELL AS men. ISIS wants women as settlers, and knows the nearby presence of women and children strongly motivates soldiers. ISIS demands hijrah, immigration to the caliphate. Al-Baghdadi, in his first speech as caliph, said: “O Muslims everywhere, whoever is capable of performing hijrah to the Islamic State, then let him do so, because hijrah to the land of Islam is obligatory. We make a special call to scholars . . . especially the judges, as well as people with military, administrative and service expertise, and medical doctors and engineers of all different specialties and fields.”

ISIS recruiters approach women online, tell them they’re attractive and entice them to become “bedroom radicals.” One jihadi tried to seduce a British woman with a message telling her she was beautiful, and went on to say, “Now’s the time to cover that beauty because you’re so precious.” The woman, called Ayesha by London’s Independent, told the newspaper’s reporter she found the message doubly exciting. She felt flattered, and the message also appealed to her identity as a Muslim. It was the “best way [she] could have been targeted.”

She thought the jihadis were cute, too:

“As a teenager I wanted to get my piece of eye candy and I’d take a good look, and all the YouTube videos, for some reason, they [the militants] were all really, really attractive. It was glamorous in the sense it was like ‘oh wow, I can get someone who practices the same religion as me, who’s not necessarily from my ethnicity and that’s exciting.’ It was like, get with him before he dies. And then when he dies as a martyr you’ll join him in heaven.”

At the same time, she was swayed by her online seducer to see Western women as “disgusting” and “like men.” Ayesha learned to see her home country as a “kuffar [non-Muslim] nation” that had killed many Muslims. It was “our enemy.” She said, “You don’t trust the state, you don’t trust the police, you don’t send your children to state schools.” Propaganda published across social media accounts through ISIS’s media arms included guides for women on how to be good jihadi brides.16

Ayesha was just one of many women approached in the West. To see if ISIS frequently targets women in North America, a Canadian TV news producer, Vassy Kapelos, played the part of an underaged girl interested in joining ISIS. It took just minutes for her to be approached on Skype by a man claiming to be an ISIS fighter looking for a wife. “Abu Antar” seemed to know a lot about Canadian air travel. He told Kapelos to lie to her parents about going to a sleepover with friends, and fly to Calgary, then on to Frankfurt and then Istanbul. There, she would be contacted by a middleman who would smuggle her into Syria.17

These pickups work, especially in families with plenty of stress. A startling number of anecdotal cases of young people leaving the West to join ISIS involve the divorce and remarriage of a parent.

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