3 Denver Girls Played Hooky from School and Tried To Join ISIS
October 24, 2014
(CNN) — The first indication that something was wrong was a phone call from his daughter’s Denver area school to let Assad Ibrahim know that she had not come to class.
He dialed her cell. And she answered. But, officials say, she didn’t tell him that she was on her way to Syria to join ISIS.
She was just late for class, that’s all, Ibrahim’s daughter told him on Friday, according to the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, which filed a runaway report.
The American girl of Sudanese descent also kept quiet about her two girlfriends, Americans of Somali descent, who were flying with her to Turkey by way of Germany.
Two more girls, sisters
Those two had told their father, Ali Farah that they were going to the library.
But when Farah got home from work, a visitor came calling, according to the documents. Apparently, it was Ibrahim.
Farah should check to see if his daughters’ passports were missing, the visitor told him — just like his daughter’s passport was.
Sure enough, they were gone, along with $2,000 in cash.
The two families called the FBI. They said they thought the girls were on their way to Turkey.
The agency put out a notice on their passports.
German authorities intercepted the trio, ages 15, 15 and 17, at Frankfurt airport and put them on a plane back to the United States, where they were greeted by FBI agents.
The three girls were questioned and released. Two U.S. officials say they had planned to join militants with ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
A former jihadist speaks out
Out of the blue
The girls’ parents say they had no idea their children planned to travel. None of them had ever run away before.
Their disappearance hit them out of the blue, the way other ISIS related incidents are popping up in the Western world. Two more turned up in tandem with the girls’ runaway attempt.
On Monday, a radical convert to Islam in Canada ran down two soldiers in his car, killing one of them. Martin Rouleau Couture, 25, then led police on a chase before his car rolled into a ditch in the town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, southeast of Montreal.
He exited the car, and police shot him dead.
Back in July, Couture, too, had tried to join foreign jihad, and Canadian police arrested him on his way to Turkey. But they could not charge him and had to let him go.
And this week, a video turned up of a 17-year-old Australian boy standing with ISIS fighters and threatening to behead Western leaders, including President Obama, then fly the ISIS flag over the White House.
Colorado teen pleads guilty in plan to join ISIS
ISIS’ draw
ISIS has, for an anti-Western organization, been surprisingly attractive to young recruits from the West, as well as to some young women.
More than 100 of the foreign fighters have come from the United States, according to intelligence estimates; hundreds more from Europe, which is geographically closer to the fight.
Every week, five more people from the UK alone join ISIS, a British police commissioner said Tuesday. And that’s a conservative estimate.
“We know that over 500 British nationals traveled to join the conflict,” said Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe from the Metropolitan Police.
“Five a week doesn’t sound much, but when you realize there are 50 weeks in a year, 250 more would be 50% more than we think have gone already,” he said.
To put things into perspective, though, thousands more come from the Middle East and Africa. More than 3,000 have joined from Tunisia.
Sense of belonging
It’s more than just a radical interpretation of Islam that is drawing teens to the extremely bloodthirsty militant group, a former CIA officer says.
“They’re often times searching for an identity, because what the jihadis are actually pushing is a specific narrative, which is: Your people (Muslims) are being oppressed in this place called Syria; your government is doing nothing; we’re the only ones who are actually going to help you out,” said Aki Peritz. “Why don’t you join the fight?”
Richard Barrett of The Soufan Group says many of the teens lack a sense of belonging where they live, and they believe ISIS can give it to them.
“The general picture provided by foreign fighters of their lives in Syria suggests camaraderie, good morale and purposeful activity, all mixed in with a sense of understated heroism, designed to attract their friends as well as to boost their own self-esteem,” he says.
And ISIS constantly cranks the PR machine, making expert use of slick videos and social media.
Echoing back West
ISIS’ global digital reach has terror experts in the United States worried about security at home as well.
There are terrorist groups in Yemen and in Syria with stated ambitions of striking on American soil, but another threat is more probable, says counterterrorism expert Matt Olsen.
“I would say the most likely types of attack is one of these homegrown violent extremists or lone offenders in the United States, and (with) the rise of ISIS and the number of people going to Syria…the likelihood does go up.”
Self-styled attackers like the Boston Marathon bombers could be the result.
The use of the Internet makes terrorists more vulnerable to tracking, but that has become more difficult since Edward Snowden revealed secret U.S. surveillance programs.
Opinion: What lures Americans to Syria fight?
Girls’ online activities
In Denver, the 17-year-old girl was apparently the instigator of the trip, having planned it for months, two U.S. officials said.
But all three researched the plan online, visiting websites where extremists discuss how to get to Syria. The online activity didn’t set off any tripwires the FBI typically uses to flag possible jihadist sympathizers, the officials said.
The FBI is combing all of their communications to see if anyone was helping them. Their parents think ISIS was behind the trip.
Investigators are also not sure the girls had even worked out the final goal for their travel.
As was the case with the Canadian, Couture, the investigation into the travel will probably not lead to charges, especially because the girls are minors, the two U.S. officials said.
On Monday, Sheriff’s Deputy Evan Driscoll visited the two girls of Somali descent in their home and had a conversation with them.
“The girls explained that they stole the $2,000 and their passports from their mother,” he wrote in the runaway report.
They wouldn’t tell Driscoll why they flew to Germany.
The deputy called dispatchers and had the girls’ runaway listing removed.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/22/us/colorado-teens-syria-odyssey/index.html
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In West, ISIS Finds Women Eager to Enlist
By STEVEN ERLANGER
October 24, 2014
LONDON — The young Western Muslims trying to join radical Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq now include increasing numbers of young women who are seeking to fight or to become the wives of fighters. It is a new twist on a recruitment effort that has led several thousand men from Europe and beyond to flock to the battlefield.
In the past week alone, the authorities reported two instances of women and girls trying to get to Syria or take part in jihad. On Wednesday, the British police arrested a 25-year-old woman north of London on suspicion of preparing “terrorist acts” related to the fighting in Syria. Over the weekend, three teenage girls from the Denver suburbs — two sisters of Somali descent and a friend of Sudanese descent — were intercepted as they tried to travel to Syria.
Those were the latest in a series of cases of young Muslim women from the West trying to join militant groups like the Nusra Front or the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which is waging a campaign to create a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The largest numbers of Western recruits have come from France and Britain, but others have come from Austria, Belgium and Spain.
For several months, the Islamic State has been making a concerted effort to enlist women and girls. It is deploying female recruiters, producing new publications and creating online forums.
The precise number of women seeking to join the groups is unclear, but some analysts estimate that roughly 10 percent of recruits from the West are women, often influenced by social media networks that offer advice, tips and even logistical support for travel.
These networks often portray life under the caliphate as a kind of Islamic paradise that offers a religious alternative to what can often be a second-class life of struggle and alienation in the West. Female recruits often find the reality is far different from that ideal.
While some women are attracted to the idea of marrying a fighter, others “are joining I.S. because it provides a new utopian politics, participating in jihad and being part of the creation of a new Islamic state,” said Katherine E. Brown, a lecturer in defense studies at King’s College London who studies the phenomenon.
She cited images on social media of female recruits cooking, chatting, caring for children and meeting for coffee. At the same time, there are images of women carrying automatic rifles, wearing suicide belts and even displaying severed heads.
The “combination of violence and domesticity” is important, Ms. Brown said, adding that the women were politically engaged and often felt alienated by Western life, mores and politics.
Just 10 days ago, an all-woman jihadist group calling itself Al Zawraa announced its establishment on the Internet, saying that it sought to prepare women for jihad by teaching them Shariah, weapons use, social media and other online tools, first aid, sewing and cooking for male fighters (“the heroes of the religion”).
Al Zawraa appears to be affiliated with the pro-Islamic State group Al Minbar Jihadi Media Network, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activities.
Continue reading the main story
Historically, women make up about 25 percent of the members of terrorist organizations as diverse as the Irish Republican Army, Chechen fighters and the Tamil Tigers, Ms. Brown said. But in the case of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State, the figure is about 10 percent, more in line with the gender makeup of far-right movements, she added.
Over the past two years, “a maximum of 200 women” have traveled to Syria or Iraq from Europe, she said. At least a quarter of those women traveled with members of their families — husbands, brothers or fathers.
While figures vary, at least 60 of the women are believed to be British, and more than 70 are French. A majority are thought to be 18 to 25 years old.
Kamaldeep Bhui, a professor of cultural psychiatry and epidemiology at Queen Mary University of London, said that young Muslim women were as likely to be radicalized as men. “There is an increasing epidemic of girls” wanting to join jihad, he said at a briefing organized by the Science Media Center in London.
He found that women with the highest risk of radicalization were most angry about injustice and most tolerant of even violent forms of protest against it.
“The group who sympathized were younger, in full-time education” and more middle-class, Professor Bhui said. “They were more likely to be depressed and socially isolated.”
Recent migrants who were poorer and busier were less likely to have radical sympathies, he said, in part because they remembered the problems of their homelands.
Dounia Bouzar, a French anthropologist, is the founder of the Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Excesses Linked to Islam. In most cases, she found, young women who seek jihad do not come from particularly religious families but are good students who want to go to Syria to marry a devout Muslim or provide humanitarian aid.
“There is a mix of indoctrination and seduction,” Ms. Bouzar said. “They upload photos of bearded Prince Charmings on Facebook.”
The propaganda and messaging of the Islamic State are positive, a contrast to the negative message coming from anxious governments, Ms. Brown of King’s College London said.
“The Islamic State offers a positive image and says: ‘You’re welcome here. Come join us in the formation of an ideal state,’ ” Ms. Brown said. “But from Western governments, it’s very negative, so they feel demonized constantly and alienated.”
Some of the British women are reportedly running a sort of all-female religious police force to monitor un-Islamic behavior in Raqqa, a Syrian city held by the Islamic State. Other women have been posting on Twitter images of food, restaurants and sunsets clearly intended to lure more recruits.
In Colorado, friends and relatives of the three teenagers who were detained over the weekend were struggling to understand why, according to federal officials, they left the Denver suburbs to join Islamic State fighters in Syria.
Last Friday, the two sisters stayed home from school and told their father that they were heading to the library. The parents soon discovered that the girls were gone, with their passports and $2,000 in cash.
The reality of life inside the radical groups is often different, of course, from the cheerful images on screens. The Islamic State is run by men and is strictly patriarchal, with recruits separated by sex.
Ms. Bouzar said some young women had found themselves confined to the home. “Some see the massacres, the bombs, and understand that they’ve been had,” she said.
Others, Ms. Brown pointed out, “find that life there is as mundane as in Birmingham or Glasgow — except for the electricity blackouts and communal toilets and beheadings.”
nce inside Syria, they are married off to jihadists. Several who have tried to return have found themselves prisoners, analysts said. They are forced to wear head-to-toe robes with a niqab, a head scarf that covers the face.
According to numerous interviews with Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria over electronic services including email and Skype, women play an important role, with wives — Syrian, Iraqi or foreign — often accompanying their husbands as they move from post to post. Married fighters receive higher pay and holiday bonuses, members say.
There have been cases of men taking multiple wives, as well as accounts of rape, forced marriage and women being sold into slavery.
In an article in Foreign Policy, Aki Peritz and Tara Maller wrote that male jihadists were “committing horrific sexual violence on a seemingly industrial scale,” citing reports from the United Nations and Amnesty International.
The Syrian government has long said that women are being recruited for “jihad al-niqah,” or “sex jihad,” as some sheikhs argue that it is religiously permitted to have sex with fighters to help them in their duties.
Several female Islamic State supporters said that was a myth, and that women were joining the group to provide substantive help such as medical treatment, social media advice and cooking.
“I know some sisters who emigrated to Syria a couple of times to help the holy warriors,” said Umm Fatimah, a Tunisian woman who said she hoped to join two brothers fighting with the group. “And not for jihad al-Nikah.”
The family of one young French girl in Syria, Nora el-Bathy, 15, said she was desperate to come home. Her brother, Fouad, said that she had expected to work in a hospital but that instead she was babysitting for the children of jihadists.
The family, which lives in Avignon in the south of France, had no idea that she had become radicalized, or that she would leave her home dressed as usual, only to change into a full-length covering on the way to school.
“We were completely unaware,” said Fouad, who has since seen pictures of Nora fully veiled that were taken by her friends. “We did not know that she had a double life.”
Reporting was contributed by Suzanne Daley and Rukmini Callimachi from New York; Jack Healy from Denver; Maïa de la Baume from Paris; Ben Hubbard, Hwaida Saad and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; and Alan Cowell and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura from London.
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