Is the Future of ISIS Female?

MOSUL, Iraq — Sitting in a room in a burned-out house here in 2017, a group of Iraqi Special Operations Forces soldiers and I watched with surprise as two Islamic State fighters appeared on the live video feed of a security camera. The two fighters were preparing to fire a rocket-propelled grenade in our direction. But instead of the usual bearded men with long hair, the fighters, clad in black abayas and niqabs, appeared to be women.

As it has lost power and land over the past year and a half or so, the Islamic State has quietly shifted from insistence on a strict gender hierarchy to allowing, even celebrating, female participation in military roles. It’s impossible to quantify just how many women are fighting for the group. Still, interviews with police forces in Mosul suggest they’ve become a regular presence that no longer surprises, as it did two years ago. “After ISIS fell in Mosul, we are worried about ISIS females more and more,” Mosul’s mayor, Zuhair Muhsin Mohammed al-Araji, told me this month.

Islamic State propaganda over the past few years has hinted at and laid the groundwork for this change: In October 2017, the movement’s newspaper called on women to prepare for battle; by early last year, the group was openly praising its female fighters in a video that showed a woman wielding an AK-47, the narration describing “the chaste mujahed woman journeying to her Lord with the garments of purity and faith, seeking revenge for her religion and for the honor of her sisters.”

And if by some measures, the rise of women as combatants represents a significant shift in a group notorious for its strict gender roles and misogyny — in the caliphate, men were supposed to fight, while women were supposed to stay home and raise as many children as possible — by other measures, the change is not as startling as it seems. The women once married to Islamic State militants who are now seeking to return to the West may claim to have simply been housewives, but from the beginnings of the group, some women were more radical than their husbands. One former fighter from Dagestan told me he knew of women insisting that their husband or sons join the terrorist group. He also knew of women who did not want to marry anyone other than front-line fighters because “they wanted to be a true mujahedeen family.”

For other women, their willingness to participate is driven by revenge, need or both. The devastating battle for Mosul was followed by a post-liberation rampage by Iraqi security forces who harassed and raped women and looted their homes; many Islamic State widows are now willingly helping the insurgency just to get back at the government, people I’ve interviewed in refugee camps say. There are also many widows who, left without incomes and living in terrible conditions in refugee camps, feel they have no other choice but to work for the group so their family can survive.

Although Islamic State propaganda bills the change as “a campaign that commences a new era of conquest,” the move to allow female combatants is born out of desperation. The group has lost essentially all its territory. Most of its male fighters have been killed, wounded or arrested, according to Raid Hamid, chief investigative judge at the Mosul terrorism court.