Gendering ISIS and Mapping the Role of Women

Introduction

The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) at the heart of the Middle East has caused much headache in the contemporary international politics as it has a destabilizing effect on the already established notions of the international system. As a result, extensive discussions over it have largely been confined to or emanate from the strategic perspective. Nonetheless the overhauling socio-cultural impact of the ISIS phenomenon on the region cannot be overlooked. Apart from its Islamist, premodern rhetoric, women’s role in the phenomenon seeks special attention, although the field so far has remained quite unexplored.

As evidences indicate women’s participation in ISIS militant activities have not been a rare incident as reflected in the militant activities of the Yazidi women against the ISIS. This fundamentally topples the assumption of women’s placidity and brings women to the forefront of militancy. Although women’s militancy has not been an uncommon occurrence in history, each of those instances carried special significance and ISIS is no exception to that. Consequentially, women’s participation has been frequently seen with a flawed assumption of women’s agency in this context. Feminism presumes the theory of women’s agency which denotes women’s individualized capacity and potential to assert free choice and action. As Diana Tietjens Meyers says:

Because patriarchal societies consider women as inferior beings, and because these societies severely constrain women’s choosing and acting, all feminists–theorists activists alike—regard these questions of why women suffer these wrongs and how they can be righted as crucial. Not surprisingly, then, the issues of women’s identity and agency inspire intense critical engagement not only with social conventions but also with the philosophical canon. (Meyers, 2002, p. 1)

To the surprise of many, ISIS lures women from countries outside the region, who have not been so far exposed to Western liberal values. Given the virulent masculinity of ISIS, patriarchy remains as an ingrained form of its structural violence. In fact coupling it with the severe cases of physical violations under the Islamic State, it takes the shape of an all-penetrating cultural violence ¹ affecting the morale of women as well as of the distressed society on a whole. Moreover, the resistance appears partly as a result of conditions they face or the structural constraints that grapple them. Thus, rather than being agents, they constantly oppress and suppress the women within the frame of the crude diktats of ISIS. In some cases, militant women are becoming the flag-bearer of patriarchy under the veil of their subdued consciousness. At the same time, a story of mere victimization only gives it an unnecessarily parsimonious picture which reiterates the traditional stereotypes regarding the Middle East. Moreover, while gendering the ISIS militancy it is rather helpful to talk about the “feminized” sections of the population: in other words, looking at the section of the people who have been considerably subjugated and exploited by the Islamic State irrespective of their class, gender, ethnicity, religion etc. Therefore it transcends the mere bodily category of women by its invocation of a feminized society. While talking about women in ISIS, “women” as an identity becomes multilayered and multidimensional requiring a thorough study of the phenomenon.

Thus the central questions here remain as follows: How is women’s role perceived in ISIS? Are they active agents or voiceless victims? The article aims to take up fourfold tasks to theoretically map the ISIS phenomenon from a gendered lens. First, it is worthy to examine existing theoretical positions on locating women vis-à-vis conflict scenarios and to understand if woman can be necessarily associated with any linear characteristic like “peaceful” or “victimized” as it is commonly done. Second, it analyzes the conditions of women under the ISIS and tries to explore how it impacts women’s lives. In this regard, it is important to note that the life of women cannot be seen in isolation of their collective experiences of agony. Third, the article shows how women are viewed or perceived under ISIS. Fourth, theoretically it looks at the “feminization of militancy” under strict ISIS diktats and explains how structural violence has remained in this society in a diffused form. In other words, it tries to unravel women’s role in ISIS. Nonetheless this research is not bereft of obstacles due to the lack of openness and available resources on the region and despite that, this article makes an effort to theoretically map women’s position and situation in the Islamic State. Even while doing that, it may be necessary to draw some parallels between ISIS and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and take a comparative overview as to how historically women have been treated in various militant activities. Are there any fundamental differences between them or do they equally subscribe to women’s subservient role? It can be suggested that a better situation in the Middle East can be brought about, by not imposing measures from outside without recognizing the regional specificities but by addressing the issues at the informal spaces and local scales transcending the domesticity of women.

There has been a considerable interplay of nomenclatures through ISIS’s evolution which traces its roots to the organization named as Jamaat al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad (JTWJ), founded in 1999 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Despite its substantial rifts with Al-Qaeda, in 2004 the organization engaged in a “marriage of convenience” with it (Zelin, 2014, p. 1). The group got prominence due to the insurgency in Iraq following the US-led invasion of that country in March 2003. Thus, between 2004 and 2006, it worked in the name of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and in 2006 it joined hands with various Sunni insurgent groups to form Mujahidin Shura Council or Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin (MSM; Zelin 2014). The group proclaimed itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in October 2006, and following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011 a militant troop called Jabhat al-Nusra, under the leadership of al-Baghdadi, was sent to Syria for capturing significant Sunni majority areas of the region. In April 2013, Baghdadi merged ISI and the Jabhat al-Nusra to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In 2014, ISIS cut off all its ties with Al-Qaeda and became a transnational terrorist group with substantial control over a large population and territory. Consequently on the basis on its Salafi extremist ideological position, Baghdadi became the self-proclaimed Caliph of the new “Islamic State.”

It is important to note that the group is led largely by the Sunni Arab leaders of Iraq and Syria and following its proclamation, it has spread a large network of action throughout the region and also some corners of South Asia. At different points of time the group has been marked as a terrorist organization. In 2004, both UN and the US have branded it as terrorist when it was operating as Al-Qaeda in Iraq. At the present time, various states have designated it as a terrorist group including the Sunni majority Saudi Arabia. The groups’ rampant human rights violations, instances of ethnic cleansing, and brutality have been frequently highlighted, and it has been found that Shi’a Muslims, Alawites, Yazidis, and Assyrians are some of the worst affected minority groups and this also gives a hint of the treatment that the organization is capable of perpetrating against the civilian population of the region including women.

Women and Peace: Feminist Formulations

The feminist peace project is partly constituted by its antimilitarism and commitment to developing nonviolent relationships. This antimilitaristic rhetoric in feminists is inculcated by the projection of war in some sense as masculine where women are constantly subdued by the muscular power. As Betty A. Reardon, one of the most prominent peace feminists, ² writes:

Over the past several years, research into women’s ways of knowing, reasoning and decision-making has demonstrated that, at least in Western countries, women’s thinking is be different from that of men …. These feminine modes thinking and problem solving can be learned and applied by both women and men; thus as indicated earlier they are an important influence in peace education. (Reardon, 1993, p. 141)

Carol Gilligan also argues that women think differently primarily as a result of socialization and adds women’s tendency to see the reality as a set of interconnected experiences and interrelationships leading toward a holistic worldview (Gilligan, 1982).

Sara Ruddick has outlined the figure of a woman of peace by attributing to her three identities: mater dolorosa, ³ outsider, and peacemaker (Ruddick, 1998). These three are deeply interrelated images of women. Mater Dolorosa—“the mother of sorrows”—who not only mourns war’s suffering, but also holds lives together despite pain, bitterness, and deprivation. They are deprived of their sole duties as a mother during the times of conflicts and considered as the epitome of sufferings. However, when they transcend merely protesting against the enemy aggressor and become a part of the public spaces they transform from an icon to an agent. For example, in Sri Lanka the political formation called The Mothers’ Front that emerged between 1990 and 1993 had a huge numbers of activists who were mothers protesting the disappearance of their sons and male relatives. They used their identity as mothers by emphasizing the eternal maternal suffering involved, on the one hand and on the other by being politically vocal in the public arena (Menon, 2012, pp. 169–170).

The second identity valorizes women’s figure of peace as an outsider who is a stranger to men’s war. The evident masculine characteristic of war reduces conflict to merely a masculine enterprise by alienating women according to some early peace feminists including Virginia Woolf. As Ruddick explains, “In identifying a predatory, misogynist, heterosexually bigoted masculinity characteristic of war, feminists are not claiming that a group of men display this sexuality” (Ruddick, 1998, p. 217). Thus, peace feminists also mourn over the fact of women constantly being the targets of masculine impulses in the conflict situations. And finally the third identity as peacemakers is grounded in women’s daily activities. Taking the responsibilities for violence here she tries to counter them nonviolently. They are rather marked for their commitment to nonviolent relationships and the means of conflict. The norms of femininity and the requirements of peacekeeping itself overlaps as often women find a strong sense of disconnect with any sort of violence. For Ruddick “The refusal to demonize or racialize the enemy, once conjoined with a refusal to submit to his or her terms, is the central achievement of peacemaking” (Ruddick, 1998, p. 220).

The central concern of the debate is how can a bodily entity namely women be singled out as more peaceful? Peace feminists have pointed out the masculine characteristics of conflict that inflicts muscular impulses over the larger masses. At this point, it implies that although conflicts can be characterized as masculine, peace is inherently a feminine feature. Looking at it from a psycho-analytical vantage point, it seems difficult to comprehend as to how this binary becomes possible. If we consider human mind as a tabula rasa ⁴ at the beginning of his/her life, we solely have to rely on the socialization process that one has to come across but even that process of socialization needs a basic foundation which remains ingrained in human mind. Disparate quotients of emotions like love, anger, compassion, aggression, greed, and lust remain imbibed in every human mind even when apparently it waits for the experience of socialization to fill the white blank pages.

In his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, unlike some of his twentieth century predecessors, makes a thought provoking claim on human nature (Pinker, 2002). He argues that social factors are generally overrated while talking about the structure of the human mind and claims that human beings are born with certain common sense in the form of some inherent talents and temperaments. He exemplifies the existence of human universals emanating out of the existing commonalities across different world cultures as a rich set of common human behaviors and emotions. And finally he harps upon the intricate structure of the human brain that inspires variations in human action and reactions. Pinker also in his well-known Harvard University debate with Elizabeth Spelke tried to strike a balance between the extreme “nature” and “nurture” positions by conceiving that the men–women distinction “is explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias” (Pinker & Spelke, 2005).

Undoubtedly Pinker’s assertion tilts more in favor of the “nature” argument and he makes an essentializing argument in his recent work, The Better Angels of Our Nature, where he considers feminization as one of the historical forces that helps in declining violence and characterizes women as relatively peaceful and less dominant (Pinker, 2011). His claim in this regard is based largely on the neuro-scientific study of brain structure and a number of statistical studies and psychological experiments. It is possible to suggest that human minds are not blank slates and Pinker’s points clearly supports this assertion and therefore logically it is not possible to determine women’s relative placidity vis-à-vis men. Human proneness to violence thus seems rather situational and reactionary and can be applicable irrespective of sexual differences. It is necessary to strike an adjustable balance between natural and social factors. Human brains may not be blank slates but social factors build upon whatever is already written on it.

This means Carol Gilligan’s idea of different socialization process and world-sense cannot be accepted in its entirety. Thus even when Cynthia Enloe talks about the militarization of society and its impact on women, it should not be taken for granted that only through a militarized society women get militarized (Enloe, 2000). Moreover, the binary of masculinity and femininity is equally perilous as the bodily dichotomy of men and women. It is because femininity readily presupposes an acceptance of dormancy in society. Human nature should essentially be understood under a gray light and thus any absolute characterization of masculinity and femininity loses its appeal in larger conflict scenario, where trauma affects people differently. For instance, the beholder of a horrific moment of violence can either become aggressive with the instinct of revenge or get shattered with the ordeal; it varies from person-to-person but is independent of these binaries.

Sara Ruddick goes beyond her predecessors like Margret Reardon and Carol Gilligan to refine the notions of peace feminism even though three images she describes come with their inherent flaws. To talk about the image of women as a mother first, one needs to note that maternalism is a deeply evolving concept within the social sciences and it is culturally and historically rooted. Although “the mother of sorrows” in Ruddick’s elaboration transcends mere domesticity, here the concept of motherhood still carries with it a baggage of moral responsibility primarily as the mother by defending the dominant status quo with all social inequalities intact. Even her conceptualization of the “women of peace” as an outsider is not bereft of skepticisms. She herself writes:

The repugnance of war’s predatory, heterosexually bigoted, misogynist masculinity is not in itself sufficient to turn women from war. Unless she is a target of her soldiers’ assault, or unless her soldier returns a killer or batterer, a woman may attribute predatory masculinity not to war but to enemy men only. (Ruddick, 1998, p. 218)

Moreover, by placing women necessarily out of conflict, in effect it tries to break the solidarity of the fighting community for which perhaps the national, ethnic or communal identities gain precedence over the unity of “women.” Finally, when she talks about women as a peacemaker, the definition of peace becomes very important and the question remains, will it be an egalitarian peace or an imposed notion of peace? Is it the femininity of peace or an all-pervasive notion of peace that matters? Even if women play the role of peacemakers, it should definitely consider the peace for whom and by whom. Seeing femininity of peace as a singular category will fail to uphold the trauma of conflict for different subdued voices around the world. Moreover, this strand of feminism relating itself to peace fails to reconcile with the idea of just war. In the midst of their antimilitaristic rhetoric, it becomes hard to accept for them the usage of “masculine” military means even for a just cause.

Nonetheless, the growing feminist literatures have consistently resisted the essentializing characterization of women as peaceful or as victims. In this regard one of the early contributions of Jean Bethke Elshtain—Women and War—commendably shows both women participating in wars and men being aversive to it (Elshtain, 1987). Carol Cohn edited work Women and War: Contested Histories, Uncertain Future also contends the notion of women’s victimhood in conflict scenarios (Cohn, 2012). In her introductory chapter of the book Female Combatants in Conflict and Peace, Seema Shekhawat throws lights upon female combatants and writes: “They fight like men, and hence become the protectors and killers. At the same time they continue to be caretakers, nurturers and facilitators. Concurrently, female combatants experience both accidental empowerment as well as victimization during conflict” (Shekhawat, 2015, p. 1, emphasis original).

A wide variety of literature in the past has evidenced how women are generally perceived as the easy targets of conflict zones as they directly affect the morale of the society on a whole and of course rape, abduction, and sex slavery become the forms of direct oppression in the face of conflict situations (Cockburn, 2001; Copelon, 1998; Steans, 1998). They are also broadly associated with peace. In some ways this assumption fails to capture the full picture. Although women’s exploitation becomes a hallmark of brutality involved, cruelty perpetrated against the larger community on a whole shatters her life. Thus, the individuals in collectivity get affected and the society becomes a feminized one, where the exploitation based on the bodily male–female distinction gets blurred. It therefore becomes inapt to reduce its impact on women’s lives as devastating in a linear sense without considering the whole process.

Within this wider lens, the impact of ISIS phenomenon on women is highlighted in three ways: women as victims, women as resistors, and women as perpetrators.

ISIS: Impacting Women’s Lives

First of all, there are women who have been cruelly victimized and tormented under the ISIS diktats. The group has explicitly justified its usage of rape or sexual violence as an instrument of waging wars against the Kafirs. As The Economist reported in 2014:

As for the women and children, “You may take these as plunder for yourselves.” This is pretty much the advice that the fighters of Islamic State (IS) seem to have followed in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq, peopled largely by members of the Yazidi faith that the jihadists seized last month. (“To Have and to Hold”, 2014)

These women and children are held captive and enslaved for satisfying the needs of the militants. As a justification it has been said these “idol worshippers” deserve this treatment and women can be utilized for bearing future jihadists. This is a reflection of gross human rights violation, although ISIS comes with its own premodern justification, terming them as “evil” Western values. A Kurdish photojournalist Seivan Salim met some of these women who managed to escape from ISIS captivity and brings into light some of their traumatic experiences during their incarceration. Delvin, from Sinjar area, was held for four months and as she narrates:

I was pregnant and I had other children with me. They were very cruel to us. Even though I was pregnant they would beat me and try to have sex with me. If I didn’t accept to have sex with the men of the family, they would force me anyway. They raped me over and over again. I was sold again, this time to a family from Saudi Arabia. They took one of the boys, who was with me to be trained as a jihadi. I never saw him again. I stayed there for a month and a half. I moved again to another city, where my baby was born. I was raped there too, despite the fact that I just had given birth. (Dukehart, 2015)

As of 2015 roughly 2,000 Yazidi women are thought to be held as sex slaves, although only few of them could get an opportunity to escape (Gardner, 2015). Because of the lack of transparency of ISIS activities, these numbers cannot be trusted entirely. In fact, besides Yazidis, women and children from other minority communities like Arab Christians, Shi’as, and so on are also held by ISIS. This gives the most commonly perceived picture to women’s conditions under ISIS; in other words women are seen in this context as the victims of ISIS brutality.

Second, when on the one hand women get tortured and raped, there are women take up arms to resist ISIS plunders against them. These women, especially Yazidi women, claim their agency as opposed to stereotypical projection of their helplessness. These women committed themselves to the cause of revenge militarily, ideologically, politically, and socially. Some of these women are under the influence of Abdullah Öcalan, a prominent Leftist leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) imprisoned in Turkey. ⁵ In January 2014, the Shengal Founding Council was established by a group of Yazidi delegation from the mountains of northern Iraq and the various refugee camps, toward establishing an independent autonomous frontline group against ISIS. The participants of Rojava movement have also been vocal against their plight caused by the Islamic State activities in the Northern Syria. ⁶ Thus, several offshoots of PKK were formed, like YBŞ (Shengal Resistance Units), Women’s Protection Army, or YPJ-Shengal to resist against the Islamic State. The YPJ draws in Kurdish women from Northern Iraq, Syrian Christians, Yazidis, and other tormented communities of the region. One of the soldiers of YPJ, Efelin, a 20-year-old, vowed deterministically not to spare any of the ISIS jihadists alive (Perring, 2015). YPJ as per media reports constitutes more than 20 percent of those resisting against the Islamic jihadists (Perring, 2015). Another report on this says:

On July 29 (2015), women of all ages made history by founding the autonomous Shengal Women’s Council, promising: “The organization of Yazidi women will be the revenge for all massacres.” They decided that families must not intervene when girls want to participate in any part of the struggle and committed to internally democratizing and transforming their own community. They do not want to simply ‘buy back’ the kidnapped women, but liberate them through active mobilization by establishing not only a physical, but also a philosophical self-defence against all forms of violence. (“From Genocide to Resistance,” 2015)

Famous Yazidi singer Xate Shingali formed a brigade of 123 girls called Sun Girls command to take on ISIS and she asserted vehemently, “They rape us, we kill them” (Holdaway, 2015, August 17). They vowed to kill 10 militants a day to stand up against the rampant ISIS genocide. Moreover, as most of the ISIS men are prejudiced against being killed by women and denied jannat (heaven), these pronouncements and actions add to their overall humiliation (Holdaway, 2015, September 22). Another group of 50 graduates have formed a battalion of Syrian Christian women in Hasakeh province to fight against ISIS (Souleiman, 2015). There are considerable limitations in studying these groups. It is difficult to understand how many such women’s groups are operating and it also possible that the success stories are exaggerated by these groups fighting against ISIS as a propagandist measure to keep their morale high as opposed to the ISIS extremists. Nonetheless, it is reasonable and obvious that these women fighters have put up a major resistance against ISIS and have played a role in the successfully reclaiming the Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS in November 2015 (Gordon & Callimachi, 2015).

Finally, there is another group of women who are being fatally attracted toward the misogynist organization and are accepting their subservience under the call of Caliphate. They are in fact acting as perpetrators. A significant number of around 20,000 to 31,500 young Muslim women have joined the fighters in Iraq and Syria (Zakaria, 2015, p. 118). About 10 percent of them are recruits from foreign countries like Europe, North America, and Australia. Amongst them a majority is believed to be between the ages of 18 and 25. Although there are no concrete data approximately around 70 women might have come from France, 60 from the United Kingdom, and even some other from other European countries and Canada (Zakaria, 2015, p. 118). In late 2015, 40 women from Australia have believed to have joined ISIS (Cheer, 2015). Two American women from Denver and Minneapolis have also been reported to join the Islamic State (Zakaria, 2015, p. 118). As Anita Perešin notes, “No extremist group has been able to attract so many female Western recruits so far, and their number continues to grow” (Perešin, 2015, p. 21). Apart from that, there have been frequent reports on the continuous surge of detention of young women in these countries on the basis of suspicion. As some reports show Aqsa Mahmood fled from Glasgow in 2013 to marry an IS fighter in Syria and twins from Manchester Zahra and Salma Halane left home to join IS in 2014; shortly after getting married to IS fighters, they were widowed by the end of the year (Gardner, 2015).

Moreover, due to the recent US-led military campaign against the Islamic State, an Islamic fighter woman of the region Umm Sayyaf was captured following her husband’s death in the hands of US military. Her husband Abu Sayyaf was the chief financer of the ISIS and was hierarchically well positioned. During her interrogation, Umm Sayyaf has revealed about the “the inner workings of a women’s network that’s responsible for recruiting, spying, and enforcing sexual slavery in the so-called caliphate” (Youssef & Haris, 2015). This revelation has thrown light that even some well-off women within the organization whose positions were simultaneously determined by their better halves, remained in home and participated in the intelligence operations.

Moreover there are reports of an online digital cell of female jihadists and staunch supporters of ISIS, named Free Our Sisters, which celebrates the acts of terror operating in the social media space of Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, etc. and boasts over the expanse of its organizational influence from Germany to Indonesia (Miller, 2015). As one of their Twitter posts reads: “They are arresting our sisters, so they are playing with fire. May Allah destroy them” (Miller, 2015).

Another exemplar pointing to women’s role as the perpetrator and strong supporter of ISIS activities comes from a poetess named as Ahlam al-Nasr who has been projected in October 2014 via the Islamic State-affiliated Twitter account to satisfy their purpose of propaganda (Haykel & Creswel, 2015). This woman, hailing from Damascus, is in her twenties and is married to Abu Usama al-Gharib, initially an Al-Qaeda jihadi and now is known as an Isis veteran. She is popular among the ISIS extremists as “the Poetess of the Islamic State” (Haykel & Creswel, 2015). Her maiden book of verse, The Blaze of Truth, was published and rapidly circulated online. This shows that how the Islamic State penetrates and casts its influence through culture. As her bold words show:

Ask Mosul, city of Islam, about the lions—how their fierce struggle brought liberation.

The land of glory has shed its humiliation and defeat and put on the raiment of splendor. (cited in Haykel & Creswel, 2015)

Thus, it remains a puzzle to many as to why women voluntarily choose to adhere to the values of such a misogynist organization, especially when the foreign fighters of ISIS have been well exposed to western liberal values and education. Some reasons in this regard can be laid out. Saltman and Smith attributes them to push and pull factors of being enticed toward the organization (Saltman & Smith, 2015). Others also espouses similar reasons which can be summarized in the following four points (Perešin, 2015; Speckhard, 2015). First of all, these foreign fighters are lured by the universal appeal of the idea of an Islamic State. Most of these women being at their twenties are simply revolutionizing a utopian politics. Second, having been socialized in the Western environment most of these women have lived in a constant dilemma of choosing between the “modern” Western values of the society and the retention of traditional Islamic principles of their families. The rising instances of Islamophobia around the world, the examples of restricted religious practices, especially the debate over banning hijab in France are some of the reasons for growing suffocation and psychological setback among Muslim youths living at the margins of the Western world. Thus, being able to choose something more adventurous and thrilling, in contrast to being choked, they are taking their step out of the home.

Third, there have been a pattern among many of these women to become brides of these IS militants whose activities are being romanticized in the guise of their manliness. Fourth, ISIS has maintained a strong social media presence which helps them to propagate their values in even foreign languages that becomes easily attractive and accessible to the women. On the other hand, women fighting for ISIS from the IS-ruled areas indicate that women who are considered “pure” under the strictures of the Islamic State can be assimilated to its inner networks for extrapolating information from various sources. Ultimately, their contributions are considered as their duty toward Allah. In fact ISIS propaganda over these foreign women recruits reflects a symbolism substantiating their claims of universal appeal.

This picture of women’s lives under the Islamic State reveals the fact that there is no single way of looking at its impact on the society and circumstantial factors have circumscribed different groups in different manners. Does it still reflect the real picture of women’s lives? Thus it is important to discuss how the organization perceives women.

Perception about Women within the ISIS

Talking about the impact of the Islamic State phenomenon shows the possible consequences of it on women’s lives. But to extrapolate the matter further it seems necessary to get a sense of how women are being perceived within the organization. One of the prominent counter extremist think-tanks of the present time, Quilliam Foundation pointed out:

On 23 January 2015, online supporters of Islamic State (IS)—the group that now controls a territory larger than the United Kingdom and spans across the border between Syria and Iraq—began circulating a document entitled Women in the Islamic State: Manifesto and Case Study. The text, which was uploaded by the all-female Al-Khanssaa Brigade’s media wing onto a jihadist forum used by IS, was widely distributed among its Arabic-speaking supporters. (Winter, 2015, p. 5)

The Foundation has thus translated the Arabic version of the manifesto to English, and it reveals the perception of women within ISIS. As the Foundation puts it, “This is a piece of propaganda aimed at busting myths and recruiting supporters” (Winter, 2015, p. 6) and analyzes the reason of its nontranslation by the Islamic State as it deems to be counterproductive in attracting the Western audience as such.

Although this is not declared to be an official Islamic State document, this all-Women Policing Brigade uses it for the transmission of their ideas to attract as many women from the region as possible. The document essentially glorifies women’s sedentary lifestyle by advocating their pious duties to stick to their basic household responsibilities and motherhood. Women are needed to be protected as they are the bearers of future jihadists. Marriage is an obligatory institution for women and to retain the “purity” of a woman, she should be married between the age of nine to seventeen years. From then onwards her responsibilities start taking shape with her devotion toward the appointed roles which are meant to remain in the background of the maintenance of the society.

Hence, women become a part of the inner workings under the diktats of the Caliphate operating from behind. They emphasize the need of women’s education, although this must be essentially the study of religion permissible between the ages of 7–15 years. Thus, in the manifesto they have strongly condemned the Western values toward the liberation and emancipation of women, saying that these divert women from their divine duties. To quote from the document:

[T]o live a sedentary life within the so-called Caliphate, to be exposed to their “rightful masculinity” would not only right the wrongs felt by the “Muslim community” today, it would allow a woman to be a better Muslim. (Winter, 2015, p. 7)

Women are also strongly bound by the punitive measures taken up under the rules of Sharia laws. The document mentions specific circumstances for women to step out of their house, which are: to study theology, to teach or medically treat other women, and most importantly to abide by the fatwa over a compulsory call for her fight as a jihadist to pledge support to the ummah at a desperate moment, “as the women of Iraq and Chechnya did, with great sadness” (Winter, 2015, p. 8).

A close reading of the document can help assuming the perception of women in the organization. The manifesto has avoided any single mention of the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS against minority women, instead meticulously brought out a rosy ideal picture of a devout Muslim woman. The virulence of the organization left no room for doubt and by this nature it either conceives women as a reproductive machine or fodder to men’s sexual pleasure which keeps their spirit high. The way foreign women fighters are attracted toward ISIS, it clearly reflects the projection of masculinity under the banner of “real men” ideal to be tied up with a passive complacent woman. The strict private and public divisions also show that women can be “invested” for public domain only in the name of strong Islamic rules. Thus, no matter how many foreign fighters join this Islamic propaganda, structurally they are dominated and subjugated at every level of its operation.

Conceiving Women’s Role under ISIS

To give a general overview of any militant group, it is perceived that men are the primary actors and participants of the militancy. However, there are times when even women are recalled to fill the void during the militancy. This void can be explained in three ways: First, when there are not enough numbers of people associated with the militancy, which indicates a shortage of militants (Mittra & Kumar, 2004); second, when secret underground services become an important part of the militancy (Proctor, 2003; Shekhawat, 2015), it becomes important to camouflage certain activities under the veil of women’s passivity; and third, to provide men militants with sexual pleasure to keep up their morale for fighting high (Martin & Tirman, 2009; Soh, 2008;).

To map women’s role under ISIS, these three primarily identified roles can be compared in parallel with another prominent case of militancy where women have played significant roles in the past. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a nationalist militant organization fighting for a Tamil state in Sri Lanka, had a large number of active women militants. Since the mid-1980s, the LTTE has recruited a substantial number of women as fighters. At the beginning they were mainly involved in secret services, campaigning, nursing, resource collection, and recruitment, although soon they were transformed into full time militants (Alison, 2003, p. 38). In 1983, the Women’s Front of the Liberation Tigers was founded by the LTTE and in the 1990s onwards with the increasing numbers of female fighters, it developed as a full-fledged, well-organized female front (Alison, 2003, pp. 38–39).

It is important to clarify that this comparison should only be seen as fulfilling the purpose of research and is used as a research tool because in both the cases women’s participation is remarkably high. In other words, despite being considerably different in terms of their nature and spirit, these two organizations are comparable when it comes to women’s role in them. The above mentioned three grounds can be simultaneously looked at comparing these two organizations.

From this we can draw a comparative analysis between the LTTE and the ISIS to analyze women’s role in it. As in the case of LTTE the prime reason for women’s participation in the militant forces was evidently the lack of fighters for LTTE (Alison, 2003). In the face of constant armed struggle the organization lost many young men and hence it was an utmost necessity at that point to bring women in militancy. Similarly, the ISIS women’s manifesto clearly makes the space for direct women’s participation as fighting cadres under the dictum of a specific fatwa. As women in the LTTE made a significant contribution in terms of internal operations and information collection alongside taking up arms, the ISIS women, as have been already mentioned, also took care of certain internal workings for the maintenance of the Islamic State.

However, the main difference between these two groups comes with the third role of women as the sexual commodity of men in the group. Although there have been reports of atrocities perpetrated against the LTTE women within the group, undeniably in LTTE women exercised certain amount of agency over decision-making. The LTTE as a nationalist movement also talked about women’s emancipation as its agenda. Despite its secondary importance in the organization, the leadership of the LTTE at least considered some of these modern values of women’s liberation and equality. In many cases even women were given substantial leadership positions. They had even played significant roles within the naval forces of LTTE and thus the notion of women being restricted to domain was dismantled.

As opposed to this in ISIS, women’s public appearance has been strictly curtailed and women have been used in most cases as the sex object for these militants and their role is strictly limited to nurturing the future militants and satisfying the present ones. As has been discussed in both the cases women essentially played a secondary role being subservient to certain rules and diktats. At the structural level, both these organizations have been masculine in character and women are being able to question the ingrained patriarchy in the system. Even for LTTE women’s agency can be considered to be a restricted one. This can be translated into the concept of feminization of militancy, where women’s contributions in the militancy are constantly devalued under the excuse of their physical constraints.

Although one might argue in favor of the possibility of women playing a revolutionary role in different militant activities, the basic macho character of these groups across the spectrum is undeniable. Even if we see the instance of the YPJ women fighters, it perfectly fits the first role of their physical void filling in the absence of substantial male members. This is definitely not to deny the possibility of women’s agency but to show that this agency is also circumscribed by certain structural factors associated with it.

Thus, if we are to answer the question of mapping women’s role in the ISIS phenomenon, be it for or against ISIS, it is difficult to merely fall into the trap of a binary division between women as agency or women as victims. It clearly shows that there are substantial quotients of both these elements, at the same time lacking them both. On the one hand women of minority as well as the feminized society under the ISIS rule have been severely traumatized in the face of gruesome violence but on the other the resistance shown by the Yazidi women or the foreign women fighters joining ISIS go beyond the shackles of victimization and shows enough possibilities of agency. In that sense both these elements remain present. Again if we see the possibility of women’s agency in the whole phenomenon, it is important to understand the structural factors associated with women’s militancy. More than her willingness, she joins militancy both for and against the organization in the face of a sheer condition. Whereas Yazidi and other tormented women took up arms as their last resort, foreign women fighters majorly rebels against the continuing discrepancy being caused in the western world’s curtailing some of their basic rights.

Moreover, in both these instances women who are fighting for or against ISIS, are under certain influences like the Islamist values or the PKK ideals. These influences in turn make the call for womanhood and the resistance against patriarchy subservient to their organizational values. All these cumulatively result into a kind of militarization of the society where women’s everyday life not only gets affected but also shows its signs of militarization. However, this does not reduce women’s picture solely to the level of marginalization. In fact doing that might show a kind of showcasing of stereotypes about women. Hence, it shows a dearth of both the elements of agency and victimhood of women in this context. Thereby women’s roles cannot be judged with a monolithic frame; instead their roles are multilayered and situational. It might be suggested that women’s lives under ISIS are ridden with too many delicacies and complexities and they are multidimensional. An investigation to these pathologies might need even a deeper understanding of the local specificities.

Conclusion

As had been already chalked out, the aim of this article was not to bring out the agony of women under ISIS but to theoretically map women’s lives in the phenomenon. Given the lack of available information over this topic, it becomes really difficult to understand the intricacies of the issue, although attempts have been made to permeate different aspects of the topic. Quite naturally it is difficult to claim any of the sources of research as neutral as it primarily relies on the secondary resources, although ISIS with its rampant online propaganda leaves not much space for doubting these facts. In fact, women’s lives in ISIS also have other prospects of research, which largely remains unexplored in the article and leaves room for further investigation over it. There are enough prospects of comparative studies where ISIS can be compared with conflict scenarios other than LTTE to map women in ISIS in an even broader context of conflict scenarios. One can also aim to explore women in ISIS in the light of Arab Spring and its consequences in the region.

The article brings out three possible impacts of the phenomenon on the lives of women from various strata of the society. Some minority women are brutalized, some take up arms retaliating against the hostility against ISIS, and some from various Western countries join the organization. In spite of these, women’s position in ISIS is extremely subjugated. Finally, it also explores the nature of work for women under the organization. Looking at all these aspects make claims of both their agency and victimhood, although it seems to be impossible to capture the full picture of their lives by stereotypically categorizing them under any of these two. Thus finally it can be said that other than making stringent claims over women’s distress under the Islamic State rule more intense work needs to be done to evaluate women in the phenomenon.

Although international relations as a discipline demands local household places as a crucial place for investigating women’s lives, traditionally IR does not take into account the deeper levels of analysis blurring the private–public dichotomy. In fact while doing so, as the article argues, the focus shifts beyond “woman” as a bodily category and takes into account a substantial population of the region whose lives have been constantly undervalued. Women as an identity cannot be studied in isolation without taking an account of the community they belong to, the family they hail from. As a result transcending “women” as an identity, identities like Yazidi, Kurdish, other minority women or ISIS bride become more relevant and can further be linked to the surging refugee crisis of the present day world. The society becomes feminized because people at large are kept at the fringes of world politics. Thus putting on a gendered lens does not give a linear view of the world, instead captures the complexities of the communities in the region, by gendering the subject, as in this case ISIS.