Guest House for Young Widows by Azadeh Moaveni

Author:Azadeh Moaveni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

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IN THE SPRING OF 2014, two months after her marriage, having failed to persuade Abu Mohammad to let her get pregnant, Aws joined the al-Khansaa Brigade. Because ISIS maintained a strict separation of genders in its territory (it upheld the view that women should not have contact with any men but their immediate relatives), it used a special all-women branch of the police to provide security, and enforce dress codes and controls on women’s movement. Many residents called it simply the hisbah, or morality police. Al-Khansaa reflected, in various institutional forms, the growing and widening place of women in administrative, educational, health, recruitment, and propaganda wings of the Islamic State. The al-Khansaa Media Unit, which merged with another media arm in 2015, produced and disseminated its own bespoke campaigns and messages that catered directly to women. Its major tract, “Women in the Islamic State: A Message and a Report,” reviews the degraded status of women under secular feminism and Western culture (“Women did not reap anything from the myth of ‘equality with men’ except thorns”) and then outlines women’s rights, potential, and duties under the caliphate. It centers women at the very heart of the jihadist movement—“Know that the Ummah of Muhammad (PBUH) will not rise without your helping hands”—and raises the possibility of women in combat, in cases of extreme military need or even simply a woman’s desire for martyrdom.

Dua joined al-Khansaa around the same time, and the two cousins started their compulsory military and religious training together. For both Dua and Aws, already married to fighters, working with the brigade filled time and created a parallel with their husbands’ lives in the group, a semblance of normalcy. Instead of thinking about what to cook that evening straight after breakfast, now they could spend much of the day outside, and still return home in time to prepare dinner.

The outside world might have branded them terrorists, or terrorist wives, but Aws and Dua felt themselves to be military wives. They heard justifications each night for the bloodshed: the fighters had to be more brutal when taking a town; this would minimize casualties later. Assad’s regime forces were targeting civilians, sweeping into people’s homes in the middle of the night, assaulting men before their wives, raping women in detention centers. ISIS had no choice but to respond in kind; it was the regime’s violence begetting their own. They heard these things from the mouths of the men they had cooked for, waited up for, would go to bed with. How much of it they believed is something they could hardly say themselves.

Dua, Aws, and Asma all attended the compulsory military and religious training for new recruits. Roughly fifty women took the fifteen-day course that taught them how to load, clean, and fire pistols, and practiced on targets in fields. It was more an introduction to the simple handgun than preparation for the front, even though there were rumors that some of the foreign women who had traveled to join ISIS were getting trained on russis, Kalashnikovs.

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