CAN ISIS WOMEN RETURN TO THEIR HOMES?     

                                          

Many foolish women (teenagers and older) are drawn to the terrorist ISIS groups, taking on recruitment, propaganda, and support roles despite the fact that ISIS is known for its anti-women horrors. There are estimated to be 600 Western nations  female ISIS recruits, but the number of non-Western women is believed to be much higher. Around 700 women from Tunisia alone have reportedly travelled to Syria to join jihadist groups. Despite this, we seem most fascinated with the specter of London schoolgirls  including a former cheerleader from the American state of Mississippi trying to join the ranks of ISIS.

The Muslim-majority countries are a major barrier to understanding the group’s appeal to women. So too is the tendency to fixate on how terrorists oppress women, a fact that many find difficult to reconcile with female involvement in violent extremism. There is no question that misogyny (prejudice against women) often puts women in ngs in Syria, Iraq and Libya or the recent attack on the terrorism’s crosshairs, whether it be ISIS’ sexual violence and kidnappined Parenthood in Colorado Springs after which the shooter rambled about “no more baby parts.” But, so too have women long been involved in terrorism of all stripes and in the case of ISIS, its Western female recruits can be drawn by many of the same factors as men: alienation, inequality, marriage, adventure, and attraction to the cause. How these factors play out when ISIS attracts women outside of the West, and in languages other than English and French, also are motives for joining a terrorist organization.

Aafter storming a holiday party in San Bernardino with her husband, Malik joined a string of women linked to recent high-profile attacks in the West for which ISIS has claimed credit. Her peers include Hasna Aitboulahcen, who sheltered the alleged mastermind of the recent Paris attacks before both died in the raid to capture him, as well as Hayat Boumeddiene, who fled to ISIS-held territory as her partner Amedy Coulibaly killed a policewoman and lay siege to a supermarket in Paris on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo attack in January, 2015. Within weeks, Boumeddiene was featured in a Q&A piece in Dar al-Islam, a French ISIS magazine.

The facts are clear: women can be terrorists, also. Yet, the phenomenon still seems to shock and hold firm about female passivity and domesticity. Take the case of the woman named Malik, in which the police are probing the time she spent living in Saudi Arabia and at university in her native Pakistan. Witnesses are now describing how she shot first at a terrorist shooting event in the United States.  The media and some policymakers wrestled with how Malik, described by some as “being modernized,” “soft-spoken,” “obedient,” “submissive,” and a “shy housewife,” could turn into a terrorist killer.        

While theories on Malik’s motherhood range from damning maternal instincts should have stopped her from being a terrorist to exculpatory (postpartum psychosis made her do it), the fact that the father, Syed Rizwan Farook, also left behind their 6-month-old daughter goes unremarked upon. By all accounts, the couple met through an online dating site and ISIS neither directed nor communicated with them (though Malik pledged allegiance to the ISIS group, who later called the couple its “supporters”. Yet this hasn’t stopped some from speculating that ISIS is now in the business of arranging marriages between radicalized women and men who are unsure of what they really want to do.

In the wake of the San Bernardino attack, certainly there are still more questions than answers. But what is so far alleged about Malik’s support of ISIS fits a general pattern in which many women are drawn to this particular terrorist group, taking on recruitment, propaganda, and support roles despite the fact that it is known for its anti-women horrors. There are estimated to be 600 Western nations female ISIS recruits, but the number of non-Western mations women is believed to be much higher. Around 700 women from Tunisia alone have reportedly travelled to Syria to join jihadist groups. Despite this, there is proof that they are generally fascinated with the specter of London schoolgirls  trying to join the ranks of ISIS.

Efforts to prevent women from supporting ISIS need to better understand and address these push and pull factors, with programs hat are better tailored to include more female caseworkers, community leaders, and family members.

Just as women are perpetrators and victims of terrorism, they are also part of its solution. Risks of backlash must also factor in the re-think on terror strategies about women, not least to avoid the public harassment of Muslim women wearing hijab in the West that follows ISIS-related attacks. The answer, however, won’t always just be about dangerous women carrying guns in the countries they were born in. All dangerous people should be prevented from having access to guns, especially those who are more suited to the far-away terror-ridden countries where ISIS now seeks to recreate terror in democratic nations.

Hora Muthana was a 20-year-old college student in Alabama who had become convinced of the righteousness of the Islamic State. So she duped her parents into thinking she was going on a college trip but instead she bought a plane ticket to Turkey with her tuition money. After being smuggled into the caliphate, she posted a photograph on Twitter showing her gloved hands holding her American passport. “Bonfire soon.” I interpret that to mean that she doesn’t wish to return to the United States.  She wants to burn her passport publically as a symbolic statement that is saying ; To hell with the USA. 

That was more than four years ago. Now, after being married to three Islamic State fighters and witnessing executions like those she had once cheered on social media, Ms. Muthana says she is deeply sorry and wants to return home to the United States.

She surrendered to the coalition forces fighting ISIS, and now spends her days as a detainee in a refugee camp in northeastern Syria. She is joined there by another woman, Kimberly Gwen Polman, 46, who possesses dual United States and Canadian citizenship and who had studied legal administration in Canada

before joining the caliphate.  

Both women, interviewed by The New York Times at the camp, said they were trying to figure out how to have their passports reissued, and how to win the sympathy of the two nations they publically scorned.

“I don’t have words for how much regret I have,” said Ms. Polman, who was born into a Reformed Mennonite community in Hamilton, Ontario, to an American mother and Canadian father who have three adult children.

As far as I am concerned, these two women joined a terrorist organization which supports terrorist acts in both the United States and Canada and for this reason, neither of these two women should be permitted to enter the United States or Canada even though each of them are citizens of those two countries that they abandoned to join a terrorist organization that conflicts with the best interest of both countries.   

Ms. Muthana, who attended high school in Hoover, Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that she was first drawn to ISIS in high school reading Twitter and other social media posts.  She added, “Once I look back on it, I can’t stress how much of a crazy idea it was “I can’t believe it. I ruined my life. I ruined my future.”  President Trump said that he had directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to let Ms. Muthana back in the United States.

President Trump made no mention of American women who had married ISIS fighters and whom the United States had not returned home. Both Ms. Muthana and Ms. Polman said they had not been visited by American officials since their capture. They also said there was a family of four sisters from Seattle, with four children, who were being detained in a separate camp. A former law enforcement official confirmed that a Seattle family had traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, but did not have further information.

A small number of Americans — as few as 59, according to data tracked by the George Washington University Program on Extremism — are known to have traveled to Syria to join ISIS. Nearly all the American men captured in battle have been repatriated, but it is unclear why some of the American women and their children — at least 13 known to The Times have not been repatriated.

I don’t understand why the United States permitted the men to be repatriated since they may have been ISIS killers. 

A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment on the two cases, but said that agents would typically work to build a criminal case against any American who joined the Islamic State, a designated terrorist organization.

Robert Palladino, a spokesman for the American State Department, described the situation for Americans in Syria as being “extremely complicated.” He said, “We’re looking into these cases to better understand the details.”

A Canadian government official said that it could be difficult for Canadians detained in Syria to leave the region because they were likely to face serious charges in neighboring countries.

Citing the many crimes committed by ISIS, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the George Washington program, said that there were “thousands of legitimate reasons to question the sincerity” of appeals like those of Ms. Muthana and Ms. Polman. Ms. Muthana and Ms. Polman acknowledged in the interview that many Americans would question whether they deserved to be brought back home after joining one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups. “How do you go from burning a passport to crying yourself to sleep because you have so much deep regret? Ms. Polman asked. “How do you show people that?”

The foreign women of the Islamic State are for the most part reduced to simplistic narratives about being ‘jihadi brides that have been  ‘brainwashed and ‘subjected to online grooming and  as a result, they aided and abetted many of these atrocities and in some cases directly perpetrated them.

The daughter of Yemeni immigrants, Ms. Muthana grew up in an ultra-strict household. There was no partying, no boyfriends and no cellphone. When she finished high school, her father gave her a phone as a graduation gift. It soon became her portal to the world of extreme Islam. Less than two years later, in 2014, an online contact walked her through the steps of joining the Islamic State, she said: Board a flight to Turkey. When you land and gave her the number to call was the message she received from a ISIS promoter.  

To pay for the trip, Ms. Muthana enrolled in classes at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she was a sophomore business major, but then withdrew and cashed the tuition check  given to her by her parents. She packed a book bag with her clothes and told her family she was going to an event in Atlanta, a two-hour drive away. Instead she headed directly to the Birmingham airport for a flight to Istanbul, Turkky.

She later said, “I was crying because I thought I was making a big sacrifice for the sake of God and I was giving up my family, my home, my comfort, everything I know, everything I loved. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

We have to keep in mind that teenagers’ brains aren’t as mature as those of adults. They can be easily swayed. However, was she not aware of the brutality that ISIS was bringing to the people in Iraq and Syria? Was her motive actually her desire for adventure?

Ms. Muthana said that she was smuggled across the Syrian border in November 2014 and taken to a female dormitory, which was packed with hundreds of single women from around the world. Every day, she said, an ISIS official roamed the dormitory in a large building carrying a list of men looking for brides.

She and the other women were told that they were not allowed to leave the building until they chose a man to marry and was married. She said. “I didn’t know that would happen, but I thought there was a way out. I didn’t know there were locks on the doors. I knew there were also people guarding the doors of the dormitory.”

She said that she held out for a month before acquiescing to meet Suhan Rahman, an Australian originally from Melbourne. He used the name Abu Jihad, or “Father of Jihad,” she said. They met in a room with a chaperone. After a brief conversation, he took her to his home.

She took the name Umm Jihad, or “Mother of Jihad.” She was then living at his home alone as her husband went out to fight.  She posted toxic tweets under her pseudonym. “Hats off to the ‘mujs’ in Paris,” she said in one of them, using an abbreviation for “mujahedeen” on the day in 2015 when jihadists stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people at the satirical magazine.

That statement she posted is evidence that she had no qualms about terrorists killing human beings. 

She also urged others to join the terror organization. She posted.  “There are soooo many Aussies and Brits here but where are the Americans, wake up you cowards.”

And she used her Twitter account to help incite attacks in the West, including in the United States. “Americans wake up!” she wrote on March 15, 2015. “You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on streets and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them.”

Now you know why President Trump instructed his Secretary of State to make sure that this woman never gets back into the United States. There is no doubt in my mind that if she got back into the United States, she would murder Americans.

During the Second World War there was a Japanese woman who was a citizen of the United States. She visited Japan before the war against the United States began. She was trapped in Japan and told to send messages in English to the soldiers fighting Japan. She never told the Americans to kill one another. She did however tease the solders saying that the men at home were going out with the soldier’s girlfriends and wives.  After the war, she was sent back to the United States and imprisoned for several years. She spent the rest of his life in the United States.  She was not an evil woman like Ms. Muthana is.

After giving birth to a son, Ms. Muthana moved from house to house, chasing the shrinking shadow of the caliphate. When the Iraqi city of Raqqa fell in late 2017, she moved to Mayadeen, along the Euphrates River Valley. When Mayadeen fell, she moved to Hajin, and from there to Shafa, a village in the last sliver of ISIS’s territory. Hundreds of airstrikes hammered the area and yet she survived the bombing.

Her Twitter account has since been suspended, but the posts were copied and shared with The Times by the George Washington program.

She had barely been married three months when Ms. Muthana said, that when she was at home napping and a man ran up the stairs, he was  yelling that her husband had been “martyred.” After his death, she consented to two more arranged marriages. She married a third time and sometime after, she divorced her husband, whom she declined to name.

All she took was her baby and his stroller. When darkness fell, the group she was with got lost and spent the night in the frigid cold. The next day, January 10^th, she completed the journey and surrendered to American troops in the Syrian desert who then fingerprinted her.

Days later, Ms. Polman followed the same route and surrendered as well. Weeks later, after having no contact from the American or Canadian authorities, she and Ms. Muthana reached out to the Red Cross to get help. They were also in touch with a lawyer who was trying to help navigate their return to North America.

Ms. Muthana gave a handwritten note to the lawyer. In it, she said, “I realized how I didn’t appreciate or maybe even really understand how important the freedoms that we have in America are. I do now,” she wrote. “To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and any concerns I would cause my country. would be hard for me to really express properly.”

Mr. Hughes, the deputy director of the George Washington University Program on Extremism, said the United States had an obligation to bring her home — “albeit in handcuffs.”

Ms. Polman said she was smuggled into the caliphate in early 2015, after using an American passport to fly from Vancouver to Istanbul.

She said she had recently taken an interest in nursing, and had begun corresponding with a man in Syria who used the nom de guerre Abu Aymen. The man, whom she later married, told her that nursing skills were needed in the growing caliphate.

By the time Ms. Polman arrived in the caliphate, its crimes were well documented, including beheading journalists, enslaving and systematically raping women from the Yazidi minority and burning prisoners alive. Both she and Ms. Muthana were evasive when asked about that brutality. She said, “I’m not interested in bloodshed, and I didn’t know what to believe,” Ms. Polman said. “These are videos on YouTube. What’s real? What’s not real?”

Ms. Muthana at the time of the publishing of this article, is still living in Syria with her son. I doubt that she will ever be permitted to return to the United States. I am sorry that her son who has to remain with his mother and not enjoy his life in a democratic nation like the United States. Anyone that advocates citizens killing other citizens is a terrorist and as such, she doesn’t qualify for her citizenship be renewed.

After the Second World War was over, German, Italian and Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen were permitted to move to the United States and other democratic nations if they weren’t war criminals. Terrorists and war criminals are not given that privilege nor should they be. 

Ms. Polman said her break with the caliphate came more violently, just a year after her arrival. She claims that she tried to escape, but was spotted by ISIS intelligence agents as she approached a woman about finding a smuggler at the market. She was imprisoned in a jail cell in Raqqa, she said, where she spent so much time that she eventually counted all 4,422 tiles.

She was repeatedly taken out of her cell and interrogated, she said. One night, she said, she was raped. “They took me down the hallway, and it was really dark,” she said. “There were metal doors, heavy ones, and I slipped, I remember, and they kicked me.”

She was able to get assistance to return to Canada. Since she didn’t commit acts of terrorism or advocate terrorism, she was permitted to return to her home in Vancouver.

Democratic nations shouldn’t except any of its former citizens  who join terrorist organizations in other countries who serve in any positions that they the participate in as  terrorist acts for obvious reasons whatsoever.

No matter how these terrorists such as Ms. Muthana claim that they are very sorry for what they did, their confessions are no guarantee that they won’t conduct terrorist acts in their home country if permitted to return to the country of their births.