Two female Canadian ISIL fighters caught: report

PAIR AMONG GROUP OF WOMEN CAPTURED IN SECRET TUNNEL IN MOSUL, REPORT SAYS

If two female ISIL fighters from Canada have been captured in the rubble of Mosul, as unconfirmed reports suggest, they would be part of a bizarre Canadian export to the terrorist organization. As many as 20 women from here have joined the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and most have given birth since arriving in Iraq or Syria, says one of Canada’s leading experts on radicalization.

Media reports suggest Iraqi forces cleaning up the remnants of ISIL defences captured 20 or more female fighters — including women from Germany, Russia, Turkey and Canada — in a secret tunnel under the city.

Global Affairs Canada said Tuesday it was looking into the story but had not confirmed that any of this country’s citizens had been detained.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a researcher affiliated with Dalhousie University, said his interviews with fighters and their families in Canada indicate at least 15 to 20 women have joined ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and most now have children.

“With the fall of Mosul and as the fight in Raqqa (the de-facto ISIL capital in Syria) intensifies, we are definitely going to see some foreign fighters or women try to surrender,” he said in an email interview. “So, (the report) is not entirely surprising.”

Among those reportedly captured was a 16-yearold German girl, Linda Wenzel, who left her hometown of Pulsnitz, near Dresden, a year ago after a rapid conversion to Islam, London’s Daily Telegraph reports.

Photographs from the shattered streets of Mosul show a pale, frightened-looking young woman surrounded by Iraqi troops, many taking cellphone snapshots of her.

The soldiers initially thought she was an ethnic Yazidi girl who had been captured by ISIL because of her lack of Arabic, reports said. Iraqi troops said they found guns and suicide-bomb vests in the tunnels where the women were caught.

Jocelyn Sweet, a Global Affairs Canada spokeswoman, said only that the government is aware of the reports and looking into them.

“We are in contact with local authorities, and gathering additional information,” she said.

Amarasingam said there have already been cases of female ISIL members deciding to surrender rather than try to survive on their own after their husbands were killed.

“There are some Canadian women who travelled to Syria and Iraq together, so it might be that they tried to leave together as well,” he said.

That so many women from Western countries have joined Islamic State is as surprising as it appears, something that never happened with other Islamist movements, said Phil Gurski, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst and author of the book, Western Foreign Fighters.

The reason may lie with ISIL’s sophisticated use of online media, making its propaganda — and its male members’ boastful profiles — accessible on laptops, smartphones and tablets worldwide. The women’s motives include ideological and religious fervour, but other factors, too, he said.

“Some of it is for the glory of caliphate, some of it ‘Because I was bored,’ some of it ‘Because these guys were kind of hunky,’” Gurski said. “But … the one thing we have learned: we never saw females going to Somalia, we never saw females going to Afghanistan, we never saw females going to Bosnia in the ’90s. This is a real new phenomenon.”

Amarasingam said he believes the women are driven by similar religious and political zeal as male Westerners who have defected to ISIL.

“There’s this assumption that women are travelling just to get married or something, which is sometimes true, but mostly false,” he said.

As for ISIL, attracting women was an important way to help create what it saw as a real but nascent Islamic state, eager to bolster the population by reproduction and other means, Gurski said.

When and if those women return to Canada, they may not have had the weapons training that would make them a threat to carry out attacks themselves, said Gurski, now the head of Borealis threat and risk consulting.

But with the cachet in extremist circles of having joined ISIL, they could wind up being a potent force for spreading the group’s ideology here, he warned.