The Islamic State (ISIS) is recruiting large numbers of young women who end up serving the brutal terrorists as propagandists, recruiters, strict enforcers of harsh sharia laws, wives of ISIS fighters and even overseers of rape brothels filled with non-Muslim women auctioned as slaves.
At the Faith Angle Forum on Religion, Politics and Public Life in Miami, William McCants, author of "The ISIS Apocalypse," and Bernard Haykel, a Princeton Islamic scholar, exposed ISIS' vicious treatment of women it captures, and its insidious influence in recruiting young Islamic women from around the world to join its terrorist ranks,
Fortune reports.
"What was eye-opening to me in my research is that the women were every bit as motivated as the men," McCants, of the Brookings Institution, told the forum.
Female ISIS recruits often are put in charge of the "morality police," who enforce dress and behavior codes on female Muslims of ISIS. "Women are doling out punishment to women," Haykel told the group.
"As outsiders, these young jihadists show a willingness to be more ruthless to local populations," Fortune reports.
Rape and slavery of captured non-Muslim women and girls, who are considered war booty, is considered acceptable by ISIS, Haykel said, adding that ISIS "enslaves non-Muslim women and children. That's what the early Muslims did."
Haaretz reports that thousands of Yazidi women and girls were enslaved by ISIS, repeatedly raped, sold, traded, and forced into brothels, as part of ISIS's plans to wipe out the religious minority.
If they are freed or escaped, they often are rejected by their families as having been shamed by rape, and as many as 60 each month commit suicide.
One woman captured by ISIS told Haaretz: "It was like a slave market. The ISIS commanders, including Turks, Germans, and Chechens, came every day and bought one of us females, including girls who were 12 or 13." The going rate for a woman captive was about $50.
How to battle ISIS recruitment in the West has authorities stumped. Using Internet sites, ISIS recruiters, many of whom are females, have lured up to 550 Western women to leave their homes and join ISIS in Iraq or Syria, to become fighters and the wives of ISIS soldiers,
US News and World Report notes.
The appeal of ISIS female recruiters is enticing. One British Muslim girl, upset at being an outsider in a non-Muslim country, was approached by a female ISIS recruiter online, who sympathized and told her, "I swear by Allah I completely understand the feeling. I refused in the west to marry anyone unless he was a mujahid. I wanted someone who fought for Allah's deen," the responder wrote, "and it is a beautiful feeling being married to a mujahid."
"For women there is an added allure — the prominence gained by marrying an ISIS fighter, a status that grows even larger if her husband is killed," Fortune notes.
"To be the wife of a martyr brings you great status in that community, and it brings you a pension," McCants commented. "You can become powerful as a spouse. There is a long history of that" in Islam.
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