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 current name in 2011. But few outside of the region were paying much attention when this relatively small, relatively unknown organization suddenly swept across much of northern Syria, ignoring the border with Iraq and moving to occupy a huge swath of territory of western and central Iraq including Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.
The ISIS announcement that it was establishing a caliphate, with the now-occupied Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital, was shockingly sudden and unexpected. That announcement was one reason new recruits from outside of Iraq and Syria, even outside the Middle East, began joining ISIS in much larger numbers. But the US response was most concerned with developments in Iraq, where ISIS trampled the huge Washington-funded and Pentagon-trained military, whose soldiers and commanders mostly ran away, leaving their US weapons behind for ISIS to capture.
The immediate question was how ISIS was able to win what looked like such a lopsided battle. As Patrick Cockburn recounts in the preface to The Jihadis Return,
ISIS captured Iraq’s northern capital, Mosul, after three days of fighting. The Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which $41.6 billion had been spent in the three years since 2011, but this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading to Kurdistan and safety. The flight was led by commanding officers, some of whom changed into civilian clothes as they abandoned their men. Given that ISIS may have had as few as 1,300 fighters in its assault on Mosul, this was one of the great military debacles in history.
So how could ISIS win, even temporarily, against powerful militaries in Iraq and Syria? There are two answers. In Syria, it was the chaos of an exploding civil war, with the regime’s military stretched thin in some areas, and the anti-Assad opposition fighters – divided, poorly armed, and badly led – that allowed a better-armed, wealthier militia such as ISIS to move to a far more powerful position. There was simply too little opposition, and it was able to take over whole cities, such as its erstwhile capital, Raqqa, as well as sections of Aleppo and elsewhere, without serious opposition.
In Iraq, ISIS triumphed because it did not fight alone. It was able to take advantage of vital support from three components of Iraq’s Sunni community, support shaped by the increasingly repressive actions of the Shi’a-dominated sectarian government in Baghdad. They included Sunni tribal leaders, Sunni former military officers including Saddam Hussein-era Baathist generals, and ordinary Sunni communities who bore the brunt of the US-backed Baghdad government’s often brutal tactics.
The reason for the Sunni support for ISIS had less to do with what ISIS stands for – many Iraqi (and Syrian) Sunnis are profoundly secular, and most remained very much opposed to the brutality of ISIS – and far more to do with the disenfranchisement of Sunni communities under the rule of Shi’a-controlled governments in Baghdad. For many, the ongoing repression at the hands of their own government made an alliance with ISIS an acceptable, even preferable option – despite, rather than because of, its extremism.
From the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the large Sunni minority had been at the forefront of opposition. Sunnis had been privileged under the Baathist rule of Saddam Hussein and held positions of power inside the government, especially in the military. All those positions were lost as the US occupation dismantled the civil service and destroyed the Iraqi army. Both before and after the creation of ISIS and its forebears, Sunni militias, some linked to tribal organizations and often led by former generals, played a huge role in fighting the US and the new US-created government and security forces being established in Baghdad.
The US-created Sunni Awakening, paying off Sunni militias to fight for the US and its allies rather than against them, worked for a while – the intensity of the civil war diminished. But the repression aimed at Sunni communities across Iraq never really ended during the Awakening movement’s heyday, and when the US and Maliki stopped paying off the tribes, the repression escalated and Sunni opposition rose again.
Maliki’s government had become a major part of the problem of sectarianism in the country. As a consequence, Sunnis were far more likely to join with ISIS, seeing them as an armed force that would defend Sunni interests, or at least challenge some of the worst abuses