OPINION:
Forget the bogus “war on women.”
There is an actual war going on, and the enemy is engaged in a “war with women.”
The barbaric Islamic State is recruiting so many Western women that it’s giving new meaning to the phrase the “feminine mystique.”
Since ISIS emerged as the world’s richest and most fearsome terrorist organization, it has seized large territories in Iraq and Syria, earned $3 million per day in oil revenue on the black market, executed several Americans and hundreds of others, downed a Russian commercial jet, carried out sophisticated attacks in Paris and Beirut, and inspired attacks from Algeria to Oklahoma to San Bernardino, Calif.
The jihad — led by the Islamic State, al Qaeda, the Khorasans, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, Islamic Jihad, Ansar al-Shariah, al-Nusra Front, the Muslim Brotherhood and countless others — is everywhere, despite President Obama’s repeated claims that the threat is “contained.”
Male jihadis now know that if their mission to spread Islam by the sword and install Shariah globally is to succeed, they’re going to need women.
But the “fairer sex” these ladies are not.
In the past, militants have welcomed the support of women as mothers who sacrifice their children as suicide bombers, propagandists and covers for terrorist activity when authorities closed in.
Now, however, terrorist organizations are actively recruiting women as incubators of the next generation of fighters, as social media queens and most disturbingly, as killers.
According to a new report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, of the 71 recruits for the Islamic State arrested in the United States since 2014, 10 were women.
As The Washington Times put it, “Researchers identified 300 American and/or U.S.-based Islamic State sympathizers who use social media to radicalize new recruits. About one third of those accounts were operated by women.”
The GWU study says, “A handful of studies have attempted to identify the reasons why ISIS’ ideology attracts a growing number of Western women. While some of these motivations are identical to that of their male counterparts (i.e., the search for a personal identity and the desire to build a strict Islamic society), others are specific to women.”
The numbers shouldn’t be surprising. The female jihadi in San Bernardino, Tashfeen Malik, was a thoroughly committed Islamist who helped to inspire her husband, Syed Farook, to join the attack. Malik, a Pakistani, had pledged her allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook as she and Farook were killing 14 people.
Within days of that attack, three women strapped themselves with explosives and blew themselves up at Lake Chad, killing 27 people and injuring 90. The women were part of the Islamic group Boko Haram, which has already killed about 20,000 people in Nigeria and surrounding countries over the past six years. It is notorious for recruiting women as fighters and for abductions of young girls to serve as sex slaves and future terrorists.
And recently it was reported that two teenage girls, who had fled their native Austria to join ISIS, had become pregnant by the terrorists and were subsequently killed, one in crossfire and the other beaten to death for trying to escape.
According to counterterrorism reports, hundreds of Western young women and girls — up to 10 percent of recruits — are joining Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.
In the United States in 2014, a 19-year-old Somali woman from St. Paul, Minn., snuck away from her parents, flew to Turkey and joined the Islamic State in Syria. At least one other woman is suspected of helping her leave the country.
Another young woman, Shannon Conley, 19, of Colorado, had been recruited online and became engaged to an ISIS jihadi in Syria. She was arrested at Denver International Airport with a one-way ticket and pleaded guilty for trying to travel to the region to join the terrorist organization.
According to researchers at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at Kings College London, many female recruits hold college degrees and come from well-off backgrounds.
In a particularly notorious case, a former British housewife, Samantha Lewthwaite, joined ISIS in 2014 and is considered one of its most valuable assets. Known as the “Special One” or the “White Widow,” Lewthwaite has been the world’s most-wanted woman since 2013. She is reportedly training an all-woman army of suicide bombers for the Islamic State. Perhaps the Chad bombers were her handiwork.
The main concern for Western law enforcement is that these women may return on their home countries’ passports, come in as “refugees” or as part of a spousal or familial relationship, such as Malik, and launch attacks.
As concerned as we should be about the unique threat posed by these women, however, we should also champion the true heroines in this war, such as the scores of Kurdish women who are battling ISIS as courageously as the men by their sides.
After all, Islamism is both a “war on women” and a “war with women.” And that’s something the civilized world should be united in smashing.
• Monica Crowley is editor of online opinion at The Washington Times.
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