ISIL's female fighters shouldn't get special treatment

Taylor Luck argues that female members of ISIL should recieve the same punishments as their male counterparts

With ISIL teetering, governments and security experts have sounded the alarm over the return of some 30,000 foreign fighters back to their home countries. Welayat Salahuddin / AFP

With ISIL teetering, governments and security experts have sounded the alarm over the return of some 30,000 foreign fighters back to their home countries. But what happens to women who return?

An estimated 10 per cent of westerners who have joined ISIL are women and thousands more have come from Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria – some with their children, others having started families with fighters.

Both western and Arab press tell the tales of women “deceived” and “brainwashed” by ISIL. Families petition their governments to bring their daughters and sisters home. These women, they say, are victims of ISIL’s dark reach. But many women who serve under ISIL’s black banner are far from victims; they are victimisers.

For three years, ISIL women have preyed on other women to help ISIL’s terror enter each and every home and household.

None has been more vicious than the Khansaa Brigade, the feared all-women’s police force that imposes ISIL’s laws and edicts. Syrians and Iraqis who have fled ISIL territory say this women’s hisbah is responsible for some of the worst crimes: torturing and “disappearing“ women, subjecting them to whippings and forcibly marrying them off to ISIL fighters.

ISIL and its affiliated groups have provided women with weapons training, with women fighters taking part in operations from Eastern Indonesian Mujaheddin in Indonesia to the front lines in Iraq.

From its earliest days, ISIL deployed its first recorded woman suicide bomber against Kurdish fighters in Kobani. The group's affiliate in Nigeria, Boko Haram, has sent many women on suicide bomber missions, killing dozens.

During the battle for Sirte in Libya in February 2015, an ISIL affiliates deployed female suicide bombers to stop Libyan militias’ advance – the first recorded use of women suicide bombers in Libya. Last year, Libyan forces arrested several women fighters, many of whom were equipped with explosive belts.

An ISIL female bomber struck Istanbul in January 2015. In December last year, Indonesian security forces arrested a would-be female suicide bomber.

Away from the front lines, women have also been key players in ISIL propaganda.

Umm Sumayyah Al Muhajirah, a Briton, provided online propaganda to recruit women from the West and is a regular contributor to ISIL’s Dabiq magazine. On a local level, women such as Um Aweis in Saudi Arabia used social media skills to promote ISIL and encourage recruitment of both men and women.

Perhaps the most infamous propagandist was Umm Layth, or Aqsa Mahmoud, a 21-year-old British woman who was prolific in social media efforts to urge women to join ISIL and encourage lone-wolf attacks in the West, and in arranging women’s travel to Syria and Iraq.

Even less known are thefemale "preachers and teachers", trained women who go house to house in Syria and Iraq and use their knowledge of Sharia to twist it and misrepresent it to support ISIL’s policies and goals.

These women have built networks in neighbouring states, in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even in Egypt.

Despite these dangers, governments both in the West and the Arab world show leniency to ISIL women.

In Jordan, several women who attempted to join the group were pardoned. In Saudi Arabia, women have been given sentences ranging from one year to a maximum of six years for their allegiance to Al Qaeda or ISIL.

Even Israeli courts in 2016 imposed a mere 22-month prison sentence to a mother-of-five, Iman Kanjo, for pledging allegiance to ISIL.

The first British woman to be convicted of joining the group and travelling to Syria was sentenced last year to six years in prison, while an FBI agent who went rogue and married an ISIL fighter in Syria received a two-year federal prison term.

These women were not lured by “jihotties” as CNN so crudely put it, or “groomed” by influential men. They were not “tricked” into an excursion to Syria, nor were they fleeing a harsh life at home. Many did not join in the search for a husband.

They joined the group of their own free will. Enough with the pity. It is time that these women were punished according to law.

Taylor Luck is a political analyst and journalist in Amman