Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

For every young girl or young man from a broken home who went to Syria, there were others from loving, intact families; for every one whose mother spoke halting English, there were five others whose mothers were native or fluent English speakers. The children of diplomats and consultant doctors had joined ISIS alongside the children of restaurant waiters and unemployed welfare recipients. The thorny fact was that the structural factors that bred extremism—the Arab tyrannies and coups, Western wars and state collapses that extremists exploited—hardly lent themselves to counterterror policing in the West. These meta forces were too enormous, too profitable, and too endemic to even acknowledge as drivers of extremism. It was only the slighter factors, and indeed some made-up ones, that seemed feasible to tackle: getting YouTube to erase Anwar al-Awlaki, blocking encryption on messaging apps, vetting speakers at universities for “extremist views,” discouraging boycotts of Israel or aid work for Syria, because these types of activism were portrayed as gateways to extremist views.

Good point