If the Islamic State understands the West extremely well, the West, in contrast, has remained painfully ignorant of its seduction. Hence our refusal to use clear, uniform terminology to define the Caliphate: ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, all these words contribute to the general confusion about the identity, goals, and tactics of the Islamic State. They prevent us from recognizing that we face a new phenomenon, one that holds tremendous appeal to young recruits. Worse yet, Western leaders’ failure to appreciate the uniqueness of ISIS has been key to the group’s success by allowing its recruitment to go unabated.
This is particularly true in relation to the radicalization of Westerners. Recruitment does not take place in mosques, as happened with al Qaeda. Instead, it is conducted one-on-one, through the Internet, and focuses on the individual, taking into consideration his or her needs, personal motivations, and aspirations. The recruiter is generally a peer, someone who has gone through similar experiences, not an old preacher. But the uniqueness of ISIS’s radical message rests on its nationalistic and patriotic nature, versus the strong religious component of other groups, such as al Qaeda. Unlike the Taliban, religion for the Caliphate is only a veneer. The true seduction of the Islamic State rests upon its anti-imperialist nature, its powerful drive to build a new Muslim nation, which is the implementation of the Muslim political utopia, a dream shared by generations and generations of Muslims all over the world.
As such, it should come as no surprise that the Islamic State is interested in attracting not only a large number of male fighters, but also women, children, and families to populate the new nation. Though women exist only inside a domestic environment, they are instrumental in the success of the new state. ISIS’s nation-building project is constructed upon the old nationalistic formula that families have the right to form a society. Indeed, women and children are the backbone of the Caliphate; they are its future.
Against this background, it is easy to understand why the Caliph, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has been encouraging his warriors to marry and procreate. That task is easier said than done. Inside the Caliphate, women are in very short supply while men are plentiful. From June 2014, when the new state was born, to the end of 2015, it is estimated that over 6,000 young Western Muslims joined the ranks of the Islamic State. In 2015, to find suitable wives for such a large number of fighters, ISIS sped up its recruitment program: it encouraged men to post marriage proposal ads on ad hoc websites; it offered access to a marriage bureau in al Bab, a village in the province of Aleppo, free of charge. Women have been given a $1,200 dowry, and the newlywed couples have received a fully paid honeymoon and a house inside the Islamic State–controlled territory.
Recruitment of women has been taking place everywhere, including among those belonging to other religious groups, for example, the Yazidis. “They beg us. They promise us everything,” one of the Yazidi women told the Independent. “They say they will give us houses and we will lead happy lives.”122 However, ISIS warriors cannot marry non-Muslims, so the Yazidi women are encouraged to convert.
Recruiting foreign Muslim women, especially those born in Western countries, has been much more effective. They are easily located online because they are very active on social media, which is the seed of radicalization for both Muslim men and women. The victims are always very young, preferably teenagers who are psychologically vulnerable, often seeking comfort or answers to existential questions linked to Islam online. Paradoxically, Western Muslim women are especially good targets as their education and independence make them more sensitive to ISIS’s nationalist and patriotic messages and more prone than, for example, Arab or Asian women to abandon their parents, relatives, and friends for a new life in a faraway land. “Ours is a patriotic project, the birth of a nation and we are the mothers of the homeland,” tweeted Fatima, a twenty-year-old Australian-born Muslim and former biology student who arrived in Syria at the end of 2013.
A handful of young women, some barely out of adolescence, all Western born and educated, have been recruiting jihadist brides in the West, primarily in their country of origin, using their native language. Their task has been to locate the victims among their peers and to convince them to abandon consumerism and Western culture to undertake a splendid romantic adventure alongside a patriotic warrior, or rather, a jihadist hero. They do not only sell an ideal husband; they market a social package, a new life taking into account their national identity and high social status.
Aqsa Mahmood, a former medical student from Glasgow born into an immigrant Pakistani family, recruits British teenagers. Aqsa is exceptional because she is a self-made jihadist bride. Her radicalization took place in her bedroom through videos of Islamic propaganda, without the help of a recruiter. She was among the first Western women to travel to Syria, where she joined the ranks of the Islamic State, becoming the main female voice of the Caliphate on the Internet.
Before leaving, Aqsa kept a blog where she reported her process of radicalization day by day, giving valuable insight into the mind of a Muslim teenager brought up in the West. Reading it, one realizes that the author is not just a smart girl who felt uncomfortable in her own skin, but that she also possesses the rationality, curiosity, and independence of spirit shared by many Western-educated women, regardless of their religion. These traits led her to search the Internet for answers to several pressing questions regarding the role of women inside Islam, the meaning of Muslim patriotism, the role of violence in nation building, as well as the root causes of the decadence of Western society. At the same time, her independent spirit made it possible for her to abandon her family and her life in Glasgow to become a citizen of the Caliphate.
Aqsa’s clever use of social media, coupled with the story of her own personal transformation, forms an effective recruitment tool to persuade and seduce her peers. Depending on the psychology and education of the latter, she uses patriotic poems or exchanges recipes for Middle Eastern cuisine enhanced by Western ingredients, such as Nutella crepes, with would-be recruits. Once her peers are hooked, Aqsa chats with them online constantly, building a web of romanticism and patriotism around them through her descriptions of the amazing daily life of a woman inside the Caliphate. Little by little she becomes their best friend, their companion, their adviser, and finally the voice in their head.
The main German recruiter is a young woman who calls herself Mahajira. A German immigrant, Mahajira traveled to Raqqa by herself without the help of a recruiter, and used similar tactics to those of Aqsa. In her chats she simultaneously discusses the fundamentals of Islam and the love stories of the Jihadist brides inside the Caliphate. In her blog, “True Heroine,” she describes her journey as a splendid adventure, a fairy tale of sorts.
Both Aqsa and Mahajira advise the future brides on what to bring on their journey and what to leave behind, as well as how to prepare for the marriage. The recruiters offer these runaway women tips on how to handle their parents: when, and from where, to call and let them know that the new adventure has begun, and what to tell them.
Clearly, the radicalization process of the Islamic State is much more sophisticated and effective than that carried out by al Qaeda. It is built upon a clear understanding of young Muslims’ psychology, coupled with a strong nationalistic and patriotic message. What motivates Westerners, both men and women, to approach and learn more about the Islamic State is not curiosity but their own lack of identity and the desire to give meaning to their lives. The recruiters know this well, having experienced similar anxieties. From Aqsa’s blog, for example, it emerges that ISIS’s strongest appeal to her was the opportunity to implement the Muslim political utopia, a patriotic dream that for centuries her family had discussed and hoped for. Aqsa saw herself as one of the founding mothers of the Caliphate and skillfully used the same narrative to recruit the three British teenagers who in February 2015 immigrated to Raqqa: fifteen-year-old Amira Abase and Shamima Begum and sixteen-year-old Kadiza Sultana. They too were model students, smart girls who dreamed of becoming important members of the new Islamic society.
The Caliphate offers to these young people an identity, perhaps the sole one that they have had. So the message of the Caliph becomes not only a patriotic and nationalistic call to arms—it assumes all aspects of a personal calling to those women to join the Islamic State in order to populate the new nation.
In 2014 and 2015, Loubna Muhamed, the main Spanish recruiter, used a different approach to lure Muslim girls from Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in northern Morocco where she was born. Twenty-year-old Loubna was a nursery school teacher before immigrating to the Islamic State. From Raqqa she chatted with less educated girls than Amira, Shamima, and Kadiza: teenagers whose only dream was to fall madly in love, get married, and have a family.
The teenagers from Ceuta, like most British and European Muslim women living in working-class areas of high youth unemployment (often as high as 30 percent), have grown up in a mixed and often multiethnic society that lacks true integration. To cope with this harsh reality, they have retreated to a fantastical virtual world populated by other idealistic and romantic teenagers like them. Hence, it is easy for the recruiters to project an idyllic future in a faraway land, where the girls will meet the jihadist version of Prince Charming—a warrior and a hero who will treat them like a princess. Ironically, the Islamic State’s recruiters skillfully exploit Western models assimilated by young Muslims. That is, the ability of the recruiter to seduce these Islamist Cinderellas rests on the manipulation of the traditional images produced by Western culture, such as European fairy tales—images that are familiar to teenagers who have grown up in the West watching romantic Hollywood movies.
Nobody is immune from the conditioning of these stereotypes. Even the better-educated, intellectual British jihadist brides believe in this fairy tale: they are convinced that they will fall in love and marry an exceptional man, a hero, and that they will give birth to amazing children and their family will be one of the pillars of the new society. All these girls, without exception, nurture a strong domestic dream. The career woman, jostling with men on the boards of big corporations, does not appeal to them. It is as repulsive as the idea of ending up a spinster.
These recruits are the jihadist version of the 1950s American housewife celebrated in the films of Doris Day, where women are confined to domestic activity and seek only to look beautiful for their husbands. To those about to start their journey toward the Caliphate, the recruiters even suggest bringing beauty products not readily available inside the Islamic State, such as argan oil and body lotion.
In these techniques, the Caliphate shows an in-depth knowledge of the psychology of Muslim teenagers brought up in the West and of which seductions are best used to radicalize them. Clearly, the battle to prevent these young women from immigrating to the Caliphate must take into consideration their vulnerability vis-à-vis such messages. Simply preventing them from traveling by blocking them when leaving European countries, as has happened since the beginning of 2015, is not enough. To avoid radicalization, young Muslim women and men must feel integrated in the society in which they live, regardless of their religious or ethnic origins. This task requires a long-term approach completely different from the military interventions in Syria and Iraq. Yet from August 2014 onwards, the bombing option appeared to be a quick fix. Equally, preventing young recruits from traveling to the Caliphate does not solve the problem of their radicalization. On the contrary, it may well turn them into terrorists in their own countries.