Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

She seemed like one of those tireless Turkish mothers Dunya had grown up watching at her friends’ houses in Frankfurt, a woman who would cook stuffed bell peppers, keep the floors mopped, and serve everyone tea in slim-waisted cups; competent, never hesitating, never letting the sons lift a finger; slightly a martyr and prone to mysterious, attention-seeking ailments as a result.

A leaked report by the Ministry of Defence in 2014 acknowledged that the government would find it more difficult to conduct military interventions in countries where UK citizens or their families originated. It was a rare acknowledgment of how complicated it was becoming for Britain to pursue strategic policies—support for the U.S. War on Terror and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, the ongoing troop presence in Afghanistan, lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and complicity in the Saudi war in Yemen that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths—that British Muslims opposed. The media, this argument held, was structurally essential to British foreign policy: the public needed to believe that Islam was the greatest social and security threat to modern Britain. If Muslims were dehumanized, it was easier to repress and silence their political objections to such policies, easier to justify the human toll of the invasions and campaigns waged globally in the name of fighting extremism.

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Walthamstow had a high volume of Muslims, and many sympathized with the core political views that animated groups like al-Muhajiroun. The majority of those sympathizers certainly did not condone violence against civilians. But certain underlying truths were easy to empathize with: the belief that the West, through its War on Terror, was waging neo-imperial wars in majority Muslim lands; that with each year the war’s geographic scope and brutality, its secret torture sites and drone strikes and targeting of civilians, grew more extreme; that through support for Israel and Arab tyrants, it enabled Muslim underdevelopment and suffering on a vast scale. There was a gap between agreeing with these truths intellectually and acting on them in a violent fashion. It was a slim, fateful gap that the majority felt condemned to and capable of living within. But for some, the gap felt so slight that it was easy to bridge. It was easy to lure an impressionable young person to the other side. ISIS called that gap the gray zone of complicity and sought to crush it. The tabloids called it “creeping Sharia”; a prominent neocon thinker called it “the strange death of Europe.” Walter Benjamin called it the “state of emergency” that had become, for the oppressed, “not the exception but the rule.” British Muslims just called it life.

And as for the political views about the overarching tensions between Muslims and Western state violence, they were widely held. And because so many thousands of the community’s young men carried those very same attitudes, held the very same identities, but had some internal compass keeping them away from violence, it was extraordinarily hard for a parent to notice when conventional views suddenly became subversive. It was extraordinarily hard to know when a child’s internal compass was no longer functioning.

But the shallowness of what the European muhajirat wrote about themselves, essentially diary entries about youthful Muslim political grievance and identity agony, stood in sharp contrast to the deeply theorized political and ideological writings of ISIS female leaders in Arabic, anchored in the discord of their societies. For the Arabic-illiterate Western women, going on the hybrid aesthetics and lofty resistance narratives of ISIS videos, and their own scattered, naïve longings for community, joining ISIS was not unlike joining a rebellion. For the muhajirat from Arab lands, many of whom had long adhered to strands of extreme Salafi thought and who politically supported the jihadist solution to their societies’ ills and their governments’ subservience to the Western state order, it was a less random choice, a hardening of existing positions within a political landscape where very little about what the group represented was unknown, in the face of circumstances that themselves grew more extreme.

There were many things a young woman could do with rage. But it took an attentive, intact family, living rooms with books, a sensitive school, layers of protection that often didn’t exist around working-class girls from East London, to introduce those ideas. Even when the government got around to employing British Muslim women who had been through precisely this journey, dispatching them to counsel girls who were “vulnerable to radicalisation,” they conceded, as one did in an interview, that there was little to no space for these discussions in British society, no avenue for these angry young women to channel their political discontent to the government.

The whiff of exorcism and devilry made ISIS a popular intellectual fetish in American journalistic circles, one that overlooked the contributions of American policies and wars to the group’s origins in favor of tracing just how much Quranic scripture infused the militants’ aims and depravity. Much less attention went to the cold calculation the West had made: that the Assad government was preferable to whatever more religious, militant order that would surely rise in its place. The ISIS chroniclers remained obsessed with religion, vividly portraying every atrocity the group committed as some facet of Islam; rape, that longtime tactic of war used to humiliate the enemy, became a “theology of rape,” an Islamic sickness rather than a war crime.

Before 2013, no one talked much about “radicalization” in Tunisia. They talked about fucking off to Syria to find a job, to build a polity for Islam, to fight Bashar al-Assad, to join a militant group, to rescue a dying child, to ensure a place in heaven, or some combination of all those things. Those choices and motivations were taken at face value; no one imagined that the young people going to Syria didn’t actually feel these things, that there was instead some fuzzy ideological process called radicalization happening to all of them.

Leaving to do jihad in Syria became a dignified exit from a life that offered nothing else, Emad said, which made vulnerable young men easy prey for militant recruiters. “Imagine yourself a young kid, thinks he’s a hero because he carried out the revolution. Imagine after that revolution you find yourself respected by the state, hired, doing well. What would you be thinking about? You’d be thinking about getting married. Buying a car. Living your life. Then you have the opposite taking place. You find your life ticking by. It’s now six years after the revolution; if you were twenty-two then, now you’re twenty-eight. If you were twenty-four, now you’re thirty. You want to build a life, but the doors keep getting slammed in your face. When a man gets to that point, he doesn’t think for himself anymore. They think for him.”

For the activist Emad, it rankled that Westerners turned their attention to Tunisia only when the country became involved in militancy that impacted the West, and then used the lens of that violence to understand the whole country. He kept pushing his beret back and shaking his head in exasperation. “We have so many kinds of extremism after the revolution, why does the media only look at the religious kind? Why does no one ask why the media outlets and prominent spokespeople, all affiliated with the old regime, were making huge public issues out of the niqab or even just fleeting references to Islamic law, when the revolution had been about employment and development and dignity at the hands of the police? Is it not extremism to make a national cause out of nothing, to sow false divisions about such side issues?”

IN POLICY CIRCLES, THERE IS something called the “al-Qaeda narrative” of contemporary history—the idea that the West invades Muslim countries, cultivates and backs corrupt dictators who subvert the will of their people, and overthrows popular leaders it deems hostile to its interests. In response to this, political violence in places like Palestine and Iraq is an acceptable form of self-defense against occupation. To many Muslims the world over, this doesn’t just sound like the “al-Qaeda narrative.” It sounds like a recognition of their lived reality. This perception is chiefly political rather than religious, held by even secular or liberal Muslims (or indeed Middle Easterners of other religious backgrounds) who have lived in the West for decades. It is discomfiting, because it runs at such crosscurrents to acceptable opinion in the West, where political violence of many varieties had long been referred to as “terrorism.” Terrorism, as the word is presently used, is a condition of ideological wickedness, stripped of any rational or legitimate context or motivation, and associated culturally with Islam and racially with Muslims.

It was not so much, then, that people like the rapper Denis Cuspert and Dunya were “brainwashed” into an “ideology” of radicalism; they simply lacked the intellectual and psychological coping skills to channel their newly found beliefs into more productive and legal means: activism, charity work, human rights law, citizen journalism. They didn’t have the living room culture, the ethical conditioning passed down through good enough families. They were not raised to understand that the correct response to terrible injustice was not wanton violence. Arguably, they didn’t even have good enough parents to teach them not to hurt themselves, let alone teach them not to hurt others.

The fact is, no country wants its ISIS citizens back. To afford them due process is costly and time-consuming; evidence is often inadmissible or hard to come by. This makes it difficult to prosecute every ISIS woman or fighter who has committed atrocities, and the risk is that courts will have to allow many to go free or to impose light sentences. But equally there is no mechanism to account for the violence and coercion many members endured themselves at the hands of the group. How to sieve out the regretters and the dissenters, those who were appalled at what they found in the Islamic State and tried to escape but could not? Most Western countries have been content to make their ISIS citizens the problems of others—the Syrian Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, the Iraqi criminal justice system. To inflict this on fragile countries already deeply securitized and struggling to recover from years of war is immoral; it also runs the risk of allowing ISIS members, men and women alike, to receive vengeance-as-justice or perhaps even worse, no justice at all. It was perhaps clear from early on in the conflict that Western nations had ceased viewing their ISIS citizens as their citizens at all. States like Britain, France, and the United States passed on “kill lists” early in the war to the Iraqi military. A British official said openly that “unfortunately, the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

In Raqqa, the U.S. military operates on the belief that Raqqa is no city for civilians anyway; that to be in Raqqa is to have asked for death. The city is pulverized, street by street. Raqqa, like much of Mosul, becomes a city of rubble.

And what it meant for Syrians was this: 500,000 killed, 11 million refugees including the internally displaced, cities of rubble. Young men and young women with stellar educations, who once dreamed of cosmopolitan careers and happy families, now impoverished and stateless, focused only on subsistence.

It is arguably the most defining conflict of our time, and yet, has there ever been a modern conflict so readily misunderstood? The Syrian civil war, now drawing to a close, is most often viewed as a sectarian war between Shia and Sunnis, a proxy conflict between Iran and Gulf Arab states, and a contest for the upper-hand among those Arab states themselves. Those who wish to excuse America’s role in exacerbating the conflict call it a war of Iranian aggression, abetted by Russia; those who wish to challenge U.S. hegemony minimize Assad’s war crimes and paint his opposition as al-Qaeda fanatics. All these descriptions carry whispers of truth, but they elide Syria’s many other divides—the fractures among Syrian Sunnis themselves, along class and geographic lines, degrees of religiosity and secularism; the frightened early turn of Syria’s other religious minorities, the Christians and the Druze, in favor of Assad, whose decades of familial authoritarian rule seemed safer than any alternative that might replace it; the decision of millions of Syrians to simply stay put, not out of loyalty but because they wearied of fighting, or chose the regime as a lesser evil.

After 9/11, in the netherworld of the War on Terror, Western security states set down a dark path; they began rejecting the very idea that war had rules, that prisoners were still humans with rights. America’s War on Terror had created an enduring, transnational third dimension, a lethal space of limbo, untethered from the rules-based international order, in which suspects were passed around, held indefinitely, tortured, and executed. The West had become more extreme, and professed confusion at the extremism that arose in response.

The 2010s have been the decade of feminist reading of militancy, based on the laudable aim of being less sexist and stereotypical in assessing Muslim women’s involvement in supporting, developing, and sustaining jihadist groups. But this effort has not involved a great willingness to examine old beliefs about the causes and roots of violent conflicts, or dualistic certainties about enlightened secular liberalism versus regressive patriarchal Islam. Progressive analysis certainly helps us see how women distinctly experience repressive political orders, where they are marginalized and disempowered by their social status, religious sect, political affiliation, or identity mosaics of all these things. But the focus seems to dwell excessively on the manner of their experience rather than confronting the wider structural causes and realities that brought about that experience in the first place. What I mean to say, more simply, is that I hope the events recounted in this book will show the crucial importance of context: understanding how Nour experienced Ben Ali–era Tunisia as a woman is crucial to the arc of her life, but ultimately her story is embedded in a world she shares with Walid and Karim, her fellow Tunisians.

Women may certainly experience wars, volatility, and state repression differently than men. But ultimately gender does not define their experience, it simply particularizes it; the women of this book have far more in common with the men around them than they do with women of wholly different countries.