‘Some people say that the female wing are even more dangerous than the men,’ Hamsatu Allamin said. Allamin, a human rights and peace activist in Maiduguri, and I are talking about women’s involvement in Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnah Lida’awati Wal Jihad (JAS), commonly known as Boko Haram. Our conversation, which ranges from women attacking communities to recruiting new fighters, is far away from usual discussions about women and violent extremist movements that use Islamist ideology.
If 2014 was the year of the ‘abducted Chibok girl’, 2015 was the year of women suicide bombers and girls joining al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa ash-Sham, commonly known as the Islamic State. According to Sarah Ladbury, who recently conducted a ‘Women and Extremism’ study looking at women’s association with such groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, ‘people either see women as victims, peacemakers or suicide bombers.’
There is good reason for this focus. In Nigeria alone, JAS abducted at least 2,000 women and girls between the start of 2014 and April 2015, and there have been a number of bombs set off by women and girls in suicide missions in recent months. According to Allamin, although some women and girls are highly motivated and want to be suicide bombers, others are abducted, drugged and forced into the act. One girl, caught before the bomb strapped to her detonated, said her father had presented her and her mother to the group before going for jihad himself.
A few thousand miles away in Iraq and Syria, women and girls have crossed continents to join the Islamic State. There is a sense of fear that more women and girls are being groomed through the Internet and social media to join them as well as reports of the sexual violence, torture and slavery experienced by minority Yazidi and Shi’a women.
However, this is only part of the story. And the story being told spins a particular narrative, one that conforms to stereotypes about women. Seema Khan has spent years studying women’s involvement in extremist movements. She told me, ‘There is almost nothing in the way of nuanced writing on women’s motivations for joining. It is seen that… women join because they have been raped or for revenge whereas men do it because they want change.’ Ladbury agreed the focus on rape and revenge is based on little evidence and that ‘more practical, ordinary, everyday explanations what this is really about are being put under the carpet for more sexy media type explanations.’
This account presents a partially distorted picture that masks the reality on ground. Women are crucial actors in contributing to violence, experiencing its impact and mobilising against it. The same woman can be a survivor of violence, perpetuate it against others, and then later be an activist for peace. If we see women’s agency as well as victimhood, we can truly understand why and how women and girls become associated with or leave these movements and the varying roles they play.
Indeed, there are clear similarities between how and why women and men join these groups. According to ‘Women and Extremism’, both women and men join because of familial and community links, forced abductions, religious study and the influence of teachers in madrassas and study classes or self mobilisation, including through the internet and social media. There can be wide differences between countries however. The scale of abductions of women, girls and boys in Nigeria by JAS for example bears more similarity to tactics of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda than to groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Somalia. Yet, even in Nigeria where thousands have been abducted, there are women and girls, just as there are men and boys, who make the conscious decision to join.
The assumption is women are motivated by personal reasons while for men it is political. In reality, both women and men have a combination of personal and political reasons for becoming members or sympathisers. These reasons range from payment for services, encouragement from family and friends and the need for protection and safety, to honour and prestige, and fighting a perceived threat to religious or political identity. Through all of this, feelings of economic or political exclusion and lack of trust in the government to provide fair governance, services, justice and security is often key.
Research in Pakistan found 70 percent of young people said they had little faith in democracy but rather favoured a sharia or military system. To them, Islam presented a purer and clearer way of life that the current Pakistani government. This is not surprising given the importance of faith-based organising on the one hand and the absence of the state on the other. In countries like Pakistan, faith-based groups, including but not limited to those who are violent, fill a vacuum caused by state failure. They offer a powerful counter to the poor, corrupt and predatory governance of state institutions.
These groups expand their supporter base because they are more inclusive of those marginalised, disenfranchised and frustrated by the mainstream. This usually includes young men and boys as well as all women and girls. Khan said these groups give the message that although you may have ‘no agency or status when it comes to traditional, cultural ways of doing Islam… we welcome you, value you and you will be a part of our struggle.’
For women, gender inequality and injustice are further strong mobilising factors. Women are more likely than men to become associated with these movements due to family connections, joining once husbands, fathers or brothers do so. Women suffer the brunt of economic deprivation as a result of violent conflict. They can be drawn to groups for the financial incentives offered. Women’s lack of education combined with expectations that husbands and fathers provide for the family leaves them with few options if their male breadwinner is unable or unwilling to provide – or is simply not around because he has been detained or killed by security forces. While the state does not adequately provide, these groups offer money, protection, safety and a welfare fund for members, including for the injured, widowed and orphaned. Yet, these motivations for women are repeatedly ignored. As Ladbury said, ‘so little has been written about how much women are paid and so much on how much men are paid relative to what they were getting before.’
Another overlooked mobilising factor is that women who join religious movements often do so because they seek empowerment in the context of diminishing space. These movements are part of on-going discussions about what it means to be a Muslim today. Women’s bodies and rights are frequently a battleground when it comes to conflict over identities. Khan talked of ‘the idea that we need to go back to 14th century Arabia and replicate the same norms’ and how this dynamic ‘has been devastating to women in Muslim countries.’
She said there has been a deliberate agenda in Pakistan to strip all ‘South Asianness’ out of Pakistani Islam and make it more ‘Saudi-like’ with women’s clothing a strong visual marker of changes. ‘If you went to Islamabad ten years ago, you barely saw women in the hijab. Nobody covered and if they did, it was with the chador. Over the last ten years, this has been replaced by Arabised costumes. You see young women ten years ago fighting to wear sleeveless falling over themselves to wear hijab,’ she said.
Given this situation, these movements, paradoxically, provide relative empowerment. Religious frameworks offer rights denied by traditional male ‘cultural’ practices. Husbands and fathers will allow wives and daughters to join women’s organisations based on promoting religion and encouraging them to be more devout wives and mothers. In turn, these organisations can provide women and girls with powerful arguments based in religion to use in their own struggles. As Khan said of Al-Huda in Pakistan, ‘The reason these study circles have been so phenomenal is that women gain empowerment from them. They go back to husbands and say this is how we are going to do things because I have learnt this is what Islam requires.’
Violent movements using Islamic ideology also use these tactics. In the early days of JAS, women participated in processions to mosques and gatherings led by Mohammed Yusuf, the group’s founder and leader, who encouraged men to bring their wives. That JAS offered this space to women challenged debates at the time suggesting women should not be in public at all.
A similar dynamic operates for girls and women in Europe and North America who leave their families to join Islamic State. Raised in conservative families with strict expectations, joining the Islamic State can give girls a sense of empowerment. They feel part of something bigger, motivated by desire for political and social change and that, in contrast to familial expectations, they have a role to play in this. Khan noted that, as ‘most women live their Islamic lives within the household whereas men live it more collectively’, it can be easy for women to not be exposed to differing interpretations and arguments and become radicalised through social media. Here, joining Islamic State is ‘held up as ideas of adventure, identity and romance, part of this ancient historic process predicted by God and the Prophet 1400 years ago.’ In contrast to their current lives where they are excluded, feel despised and experience racism and anti-Muslim attacks as well as sexism, these are ‘their own home grown accessible heroes – people they can actively identify with and who actively want them.’
However, both Khan and Ladbury questioned how much empowerment these groups actually offer despite presenting themselves as an inclusive alternative to the status quo. According to ‘Women and Extremism’, women have never been appointed as leaders. Although women may feel empowered if they voluntarily join or support a group, there is no evidence that they are consulted on policy, strategy or theory.
It seems women’s participation does not allow them to transcend gender roles. However, women do fulfil a range of responsibilities as wives and mothers supporting male fighters, influencing the next generation and in front-line and non-combat roles as recruiters, messengers, intelligence gatherers, hiders and transporters of weapons as well as suicide bombers.
Allamin talked to me about how women members of JAS would ferry guns, protect male members, disburse money and indoctrinate and recruit fighters even before the current wave of women suicide bombers started. She spoke of mothers of JAS members recruiting new fighters and sending them to their sons in the bush. She gave examples of women fighting, saying that in some attacks in Marte, around Baga and islands around Lake Chad, ‘combatants were mostly women with their guns fighting very very well’ with a woman leading attacks.
However, despite women’s direct and indirect involvement in these movements, interventions to prevent and respond to radicalisation focus mostly on men and boys. Women’s vulnerability to radicalisation and need for reintegration and rehabilitation are seldom taken seriously.
Allamin talked about opportunities missed to prevent wives and widows of JAS members left behind in Maiduguri from becoming involved in violence. She thought there should have been interventions to reintegrate and change the mindset of these women, address their material needs and cut the links between them and the group. Engagement at that stage would have saved a lot of women and their children she said. Instead ‘everyone seemed to be ostracising and stigmatising them, so they moved and then joined the violent ones in the bush and then became what they are… they had no other alternative but to join the cause of fighters.’
In fact, women and girls often find it harder to leave these movements. They are more likely to be prevented from leaving by the group itself, are more open to ostracism and rejection by communities and families and are less likely to be offered support to make return to civilian life possible. Their chance of escape is diminished by the need to take their children with them. They fear their husbands (to whom they may have been forced to marry) may return to claim ‘their’ wives and children. As Khan said, ‘The idea is that once you go, that’s it. It’s the way that my grandmother used to see marriage. You go to your husband’s house and then the only way you leave is death.’
