ISIS

Women: Victims,
Criminals, or Both?

by Anne Speckhard & Ardian Shajkovci

As Published in The Washington Examiner

The Syrian civil uprising, abuses by Syrian President Bashar Assad, and calls from
terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al Qaeda,
resulted in an estimated 40,000 or more foreign fighters from more than 100 countries
migrating to the battle zone. Accompanying them were wives and children of foreign
fighters and single women destined to marry and bear children there. As ISIS cadres are
being rounded up and killed, the captured women and children have been herded into
camps, where their fates remain uncertain.

One of these is Roj Camp, located in the Rojava region of northern Syria, where
researchers from our organization, the International Center for the Study of Violent
Extremism (ICSVE), recently interviewed 11 female detainees. This is in addition to 10
male foreign fighters recently interviewed by ICSVE researchers in a prison facility in
Rojava. None of the females have been charged. Yet as these women languish in prisons
and camps dotted throughout Syria and Iraq, the questions hang over them: Victim or
criminal? Can they return home? And what will be the fate of their children?

Sinam Mohamad, representative of the Syrian Democratic Council in the U.S., has said,
“We are trying to send them home, but their countries don’t want to take them
back.” Indeed, more countries than ever are stripping citizenship from those who joined
terrorist groups. The United Kingdom recently stripped two former ISIS fighters of their
citizenship. And European citizens with dual passports told their interviewers that they
do not want to return to countries they were not born in. They have no affinity with
those countries, and they fear torture in their prisons.

For those bearing only one passport, citizenship revocation effectively renders them
stateless and raises questions of who is responsible to prosecute, imprison, and attempt
to rehabilitate them before release. Western countries that strip citizenship base their
reasoning on national security, amid fears that the collapse of ISIS would bring an influx
of militants from Iraq and Syria.

Citizenship revocation is often justified on the grounds that these individuals voluntarily
joined a terrorist group, that these individuals voluntarily declared allegiance to a
terrorist group and/or a foreign country, that these individuals lived outside the country
of origin for a considerable amount of time without declaring an intention to remain a
citizen, and that they were not pressured to leave their home country to join a terrorist
group and/or a foreign country.

Indeed, many who joined ISIS burned or otherwise destroyed their passports, some
posting videos renouncing their "kafir" (unbelieving) countries. Yet, others did not.
Twenty-three-year-old Cassandra Bodret from a small town near Liege, Belgium, stated,
“It was a big mistake to go [to Syria]. My husband took my passport and cut it up. I cried
and broke everything in the house.”

Currently, there are 500 women and 1,200 children at Roj Camp. While some have been
repatriated to their countries of origin, most await a resolution to their cases.
We conducted our interviews in a dry, dusty camp dotted with shabby U.N. tents, many
with holes in them, sitting unshaded under the sweltering sun. Tents where women
cooked with propane burners were situated in a field of small, dusty stones.

The Arabic toilet we were given to use, like theirs, was a grim hole in the floor. The kids
played with rocks or languished in the few shady areas. There was a dirty, littered canal
in which some older children played. Their mothers told us, and the staff confirmed,
that the limited food allotments are poor-quality dried peas, rice, and other substandard
fare. “They no longer give us fresh vegetables,” one mother laments. The babies often
do not have diapers. Their mothers complained there are no vaccinations available.
Both mothers and children have already died in these camps.

Of the more than 100 ISIS cadres we have interviewed so far, we know
that some women played violent roles in the group, most notably serving in the ISIS
religious police, hisbah. Such roles included flogging, biting with metal teeth, and
otherwise torturing others. Some ISIS women were also trained as suicide bombers, to
fight and use explosive materials and devices.

Yet the European-national women we talked to appear not to be among this group.
Instead, they whispered to us about their fear of enforcers among them in the camp.
Cassandra, dressed in a full hijab (head and neck covering), despite recently appearing
with her blond hair exposed in a televised RT piece, explained that she was punished for
doing so, adding, “[Some] people are very extremist here. They started stealing my
private things in the tent. [They] oblige me to wear it.”

Prison anywhere is hard. This camp appears inhumane when one considers children are
being held here.

H.S. from Vilvoorde, Belgium, now 22 years old, claimed to have very little knowledge of
the ISIS. But wanting to be with her father, she followed him in, only to immediately
realize her mistake. She explained how ISIS shot her father in front of her as they tried
to escape — one of their many attempts. She told us, “It’s hard to be in prison. But to be
in a prison with your kids is worse because you see your child suffer.” Her 19-month-old
son “sits and throws stones. He needs to go to school. He needs stimulation,” she said.
There is a not a tree or toy in sight, much less the hope of a playground.

Disturbing issues of collective punishment and cruel and inhumane punishment arose
during our days visiting the camp. Twenty-five-year-old Maria (not her real name), who
left her town near Vilvoorde, Belgium, claimed she went to Syria to help suffering
children. Now it is her 18-month-old-child who suffers. “There is not enough oxygen in
his blood. He is not good. He stops breathing. His color changes, [he gets] green lips.”
H.S., the Belgian ISIS wife mentioned above, is seven months pregnant and risks another
cesarean-section birth.
Article 16 of the U.N. Convention against Torture requires parties to prevent “acts of
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Is it not a slow torture to watch
your child die in front of your eyes, to be denied vaccinations for your baby, to not have
medical treatments, or to give birth and return after a C-section to a camp with a
newborn who may not have a chance to survive in the heat and dust? These are serious
concerns about both women and children held in detention centers in Syria.

The toddler and infant children of ISIS did not commit crimes. Some of their mothers are
not keen to have their children leave without them. Others welcome any way to bring
their children to safety. All of the European women we talked to said they had
completely renounced ISIS and asked us to intercede with their countries — even if to
be put in rehabilitation or serve prison sentences at home for the crime they may have
committed in joining the ISIS. They all expressed the naivete of having believed ISIS’s
lies.

Western countries must consider the need to repatriate at least the children in these
camps, if not also their mothers.

About the Authors:

Anne Speckhard, Ph.D., is Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent
Extremism (ICSVE) and serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at
Georgetown University School of Medicine. She has interviewed over 600 terrorists,
their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including in Western
Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the
past two years, she and ICSVE staff have been collecting interviews (n=101) with ISIS
defectors, returnees and prisoners, studying their trajectories into and out of terrorism,
their experiences inside ISIS, as well as developing the Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter
Narrative Project materials from these interviews. She has also been training key
stakeholders in law enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other countering violent
extremism professionals on the use of counter-narrative messaging materials produced
by ICSVE both locally and internationally as well as studying the use of children as
violent actors by groups such as ISIS and consulting on how to rehabilitate them. In
2007, she was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects
of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to 20,000 + detainees and
800 juveniles. She is a sought after counterterrorism experts and has consulted to
NATO, OSCE, foreign governments and to the U.S. Senate & House, Departments of
State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Health & Human Services, CIA and FBI and
CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, CTV, and in Time, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, London Times and many other publications. She regularly speaks and
publishes on the topics of the psychology of radicalization and terrorism and is the
author of several books, including Talking to Terrorists, Bride of ISIS, Undercover
Jihadi and ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. Her publications are
found here: https://georgetown.academia.edu/AnneSpeckhardWebsite: and on the
ICSVE website http://www.icsve.org Follow @AnneSpeckhard

Ardian Shajkovci, Ph.D. - is the Director of Research and a Senior Research Fellow at the
International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE). He has been collecting
interviews with ISIS defectors and studying their trajectories into and out of terrorism as
well as training key stakeholders in law enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other
countering violent extremism professionals on the use of counter-narrative messaging
materials produced by ICSVE both locally and internationally. He has also been studying
the use of children as violent actors by groups such as ISIS and how to rehabilitate them.
He has conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, Africa, and
the Middle East, mostly recently in Jordan and Iraq. He has presented at professional
conferences and published on the topic of radicalization and terrorism. He holds a
doctorate in Public Policy and Administration, with a focus on Homeland Security Policy,
from Walden University. He obtained his M.A. degree in Public Policy and
Administration from Northwestern University and a B.A. degree in International
Relations and Diplomacy from Dominican University. He is also an adjunct professor
teaching counterterrorism and CVE courses at Nichols College.

Reference for this Paper: Speckhard, Anne & Shajkovci, Ardian (November 4, 2018) ISIS
women: Victims, Criminals, or Both? The Washington Examiner
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/isis-women-victims-criminals-
or-both