How Daesh recruits young women
SECOND AND THIRD GENERATION IMMIGRANTS WHO LACK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FALL PREY TO ONLINE INDOCTRINATION
Aqsa Mahmoud grew up in an affluent part of Glasgow, Scotland, and attended a prestigious private school. She liked listening to the band Coldplay and reading Harry Potter books. Then at 19, she disappeared.
She later told her parents that she had crossed into Syria to join Daesh and was marrying one of its fighters. In the year since then, she has turned up frequently on social networking sites touting the militant group’s attacks and encouraging more Western women to travel to Syria to help build a new nation based on its extreme interpretation of Islam. As recently as February 15, she is believed to have been in touch with 15-year-old Shamima Begum, one of three British teens who flew to Turkey two days later and who police said Tuesday have crossed the border into Syria.
Terrorism experts say Mahmoud is part of a sophisticated recruitment campaign that uses sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Ask.fm to lure Western women and girls to the war-torn country with a mix of extremist religious ideology and chatty posts about life in the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate that are laced with emoticons and street slang.
In addition to the spiritual rewards of serving Allah, the women are promised husbands and homes including worldly items such as fridges, microwaves and milkshake machines, said Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and author of Bombshell: Women and Terror .
Grooming
Bloom likened the exchanges to online grooming by sexual predators. “It’s not dissimilar ... in terms of disinhibiting them, creating a rapport, building trust, creating this environment of secrecy: ‘You don’t tell your parents, you can trust me,’” she said.
Hundreds are believed to have taken the bait. Many are secondor third-generation immigrants who do not have the religious education to question what they are being told about Sharia and practices, experts said. They are drawn to Syria by a sense of religious obligation, concern about the suffering inflicted on Muslim civilians in the country’s civil war, a desire for adventure and purpose and the romance of marrying a fighter.
Daesh’s use of social media has been revolutionary, said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online activity by militant groups. Such activity used to take place exclusively within password-protected web forums, she wrote in a November blog post. Daesh “brought the jihadi community into the mainstream of the internet and exponentially increased jihadis’ audience,” she wrote.
The post traced the radicalisation of three Colorado teens who were stopped in Germany last year as they attempted to travel to Syria and returned to their families.
The girls from suburban Denver, a 16-year-old of Sudanese descent and two sisters, 15 and 17, of Somali descent, followed militants online from Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Syria, Katz wrote. Asked how she became a “good Muslim,” one of the girls cited lectures posted on YouTube, which she said “helped me to become closer to Allah.”
Another was in regular contact with a Daesh online recruiter who goes by the name Umm Waqqas, purportedly a woman from the Netherlands. Waqqas urged her followers to migrate “sooner rather than later,” saying that “when you actually sit down & open your heart & read what’s in the books of Hadith ... you will run.”
Experts who track extremist groups noticed an increase in efforts to attract female recruits over the summer, when Daesh, already an aggressive recruiter of Western men to fill its fighting ranks, declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.
Roles of women
English-language social media accounts were created that provide detailed instructions on how to reach Syria and what the women need to bring with them. To avoid detection, they urge followers to buy a round-trip ticket to Turkey and research the tourist sites in case they are questioned by airport officials.
The recruiters emphasise that the women’s role will be to marry fighters, bear their children and raise the next generation of militants. Some foreign women living in the Syrian city of Raqqa, capital of the self-styled caliphate, are said to have joined an armed morality squad known as the Khansa Brigade.
But it is “completely impossible” for women to do battle, said a recruiter identifying herself as Umm Layth — a screen name believed to be used by Mahmoud — according to a SITE report.