Girls of Jihad: the Ladies of the Islamic State

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Why one women left Canada to marry a stranger

Eight months ago, Umm Haritha, a 20-year-old woman from Canada, made her way to Turkey against her parents’ wishes with a half-empty suitcase and $1,500.

Within a week she was in Syria, and a few weeks later she was married to Abu Ibrahim al-Suedi, a 26-year-old Palestinian from Sweden fighting for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni jihadist group battling the Syrian regime.

It is not clear whether Umm Haritha's marriage to Abu Ibrahim was arranged before her travel to Syria. Regardless, it only lasted five months.

On May 5, Abu Ibrahim, whose real name is Taha Shade, was in a car en route to a meeting in Deir ez-Zor with members of rival faction Jabhat al-Nusra. What was meant to be a gathering to finalize a peace treaty between ISIS and al-Nusra turned deadly when an al-Nusra fighter on a motorbike sped up to Shade’s car and detonated his explosive belt.

At the time, Shade was wearing his own explosive belt, which also went off and blew him to pieces.
Two days later, Umm Haritha tweeted about her husband’s death, calling on “Allah” to “destroy those who backstabbed the brothers and resurrect Abu Ibrahim with noor [light] from every piece of his body.”

Umm Haritha’s journey to Syria highlights an underreported part of the western Jihadist experience in Syria.
While the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) has estimated that up to 2,800 Western men have gone to Syria to fight, much less is known about the Western women who have gone over to marry jihadists since the Syrian civil war began three years ago.

The ICSR has located 28 such women who are currently active on social media. While most of them are from France, there is also Umm Haritha, who operates a blog where she offers guidance to other women contemplating moving to Syria to marry jihadists and establish families in the newly declared caliphate.

In a recent interview conducted by text message, Umm Haritha said she moved to Canada as a child and lived there for 14 years before deciding to move to Syria. She was a university student and said her upbringing was “normal” and “middle class.”

While she wouldn’t disclose where in Canada she lived, she said her decision to join the jihad in Syria was motivated by a desire to “live a life of honour” under Islamic law rather than the laws of the “kuffar,” or unbelievers.

Four months before she left for Syria, she began wearing a niqab, a veil that leaves only the eyes visible, and says she experienced harassment from fellow Canadians.​

“I would get mocked in public, people shoved me and told me to go back to my country and spoke to me like I was mentally ill or didn’t understand English,” she said.

“Life was degrading and an embarrassment and nothing like the multicultural freedom of expression and religion they make it out to be, and when I heard that the Islamic State had sharia [Islamic law] in some cities in Syria, it became an automatic obligation upon me since I was able to come here.”

Since her husband’s death, UmmHaritha has been living in a house with the widows of other fallen jihadists in Manbij, a town of 200,000 people near the Turkish border controlled by ISIS, which recently declared a caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

While male western fighters in Syria and Iraq tweet photos of battles, spoils of war, dead fighters and beheadings, many of the women have been using social media to describe the day-to-day life in the nascent caliphate.

Umm Haritha said that in Manbij, which is currently controlled by ISIS (which is now referring to itself simply as the Islamic State), she receives a monthly income and an education.

In one post, Umm Haritha shares a picture of a building painted in black described as the “(Islamic) Police station in Manbij.” In another post, she shares a photo of a white van that patrols the town with speakers reminding residents not to forget to recite their daily prayers.

In yet another, she posts a photo of a “new Islamic clothing store” for women.

She said the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s Syrian stronghold, has courthouses, orphanages, traffic police and is “the most organized city” she has ever been to.

“It looked so beautiful the sisters and I joked around and called it the New York City of Syria,” she said.

Missing from her posts, however, are reports of the crucifixions of individuals for apostasy, the cutting off of the hands of thieves and the public floggings for crimes like listening to music or smoking cigarettes.

Umm Haritha described how a man was recently beheaded and crucified in Manbij for robbing and raping a woman.
She said she is not bothered by the violence and believes these practices will decrease the rising crime rates that the region has experienced since the advent of the civil war.

“I would rather see this than see the crime repeated over and over,” she said. “If you don’t want to be known as a thief or a rapist or murderer, then don’t commit the crimes.”

Whereas many of the western men flock to the Islamic State to fight, the women go to start families, said Melanie Smith, a research associate with the ISCR.

“On the whole, they are going there to make house, and there is a certain status with being married to a jihadist,” Smith said. “They want to go to be involved, especially now that the Caliphate has been established. That might become more common.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State who has renamed himself Caliph Ibrahim, has called on Muslims worldwide to move to the caliphate.

"Those who can immigrate to the Islamic State should immigrate, as immigration to the house of Islam is a duty," al-Baghdadi said in a recent audio recording released on a web site used by ISIS.

Umm Haritha said she has no plans to return to Canada and said most foreigners living under the Islamic State have ripped up their passports.

ICSR researcher Joseph Carter said that in the short term, the announcement of the caliphate “creates a strong incentive for people who were thinking of going to go now.”

“It creates something on the ground that seems real and stable,” Carter said. “Whether or not a workable state actually comes into being without collapsing – that’s a different matter.”

Not everyone is just planning on settling down however...

Shortly after the Sunni militant group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) retook control of Raqqa earlier this year, it created the al-Khansaa' Brigade, an all-female unit operating in the city. Its purpose is to apprehend civilian women in Raqqa who do not follow the organization's strict brand of Sharia law, including a mandate that all women be fully covered in public and that they be accompanied by a male chaperone.

"We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law," says Abu Ahmad, an ISIS official in Raqqa. "There are only women in this brigade, and we have given them their own facilities to prevent the mixture of men and women."

He says the organization, which has been pushing further into eastern Syria after taking control of the Iraqi city of Mosul and key points on the Iraq-Syria border last month, needs a female brigade to "raise awareness among women, and arrest and punish women who do not follow the religion correctly. Jihad is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well."
The women who join the brigade are either women of Raqqa who wanted to take part in ISIS's activities there, or, often, the wives of mujahedeen who have come to fight from other parts of Syria or the region.

Though women are assuming new, more powerful roles across Syria – the U.N. now estimates that one in four displaced families in Syria has a female head – residents here say that any "girl power" wrought by the brigade is mitigated by the harsher restrictions they have been tasked with imposing on Raqqa's women.

"ISIS created it to terrorize women," says Abu al-Hamza, a local media activist. He says the brigade raided the city's Hamida Taher Girls School and arrested 10 students, two teachers and a secretary on the grounds that some of them were wearing veils that were too thin. Others were accused of wearing hair clips under the veil, pinning them in a way that showed too much of their faces.

Al-Hamza says that the women subsequently spent six hours in an ISIS detention center, where they were whipped. "After arresting those women and girls," continues al-Hamza, "they took them to ISIS prisons and locked them in for six hours and punished some of them with 30 whips each."

Zainab is a local teen who was arrested by female members of ISIS four months ago.

"I was walking down the street when a car suddenly stopped and a group of armed women got out," she says. "They insulted me and yelled at me. They took me to one of their centers and kept me locked in a room. Nobody talked to me or told me the reason for my detention. One of the women in the brigade came over, pointing her firearm at me. She then tested my knowledge of prayer, fasting and hijab."

The fighter told Zainab she had been arrested because she had been walking alone, without an escort, and because her hijab was not worn properly. "You should be punished for taking your religion lightly," she told Zainab, before threatening harsher punishment should she be arrested again.

Two hours later, she was released. But for Zainab – and other women here – the message was clear.

"The brigade has created fear among the women and girls of Raqqa," she says. "We've seen how they move, always watching women on the street, raiding schools, arresting students and locking them in for hours."

I guess they felt a Saudi Style Vice and Virtue Police just wouldn't be good enough.