The Rising Popularity of Female Jihadism

The image appears as Boumeddiene shooting a cross-bow

       The hunt is one for the 26 year-old woman wanted over Thursday's fatal shooting of a French policewoman.  Earlier reports suggested that Hayat Boumeddiene, might have escaped Friday from a kosher grocery store in easter Paris when French authorities mounted an operation to free hostages.  More recent reports are saying that she may have not even been in the country at the time.  Boumeddiene is said to have left for Turkey around January 2, final destination: Syria.  Photographs of Boumeddiene released by Le Monde show her shooting a crossbow while wearing a niqab.  This resonates as a puzzling image as jihad militant organizations support the Taliban-style rules, which allow women only to have a role within the house.  Strangely enough, the number of women from the West taking an operational role in Jihadist terrorist plots has increased.  For example, Colleen LaRose a Caucasian-American 46 year old from Pennsylvania traveled to Europe in 2009 to attack Lars Vilks a Swedish arist who had drawn a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed's head on the body of a dog.  

       To me, it seems like a strange kind of jihadist female equal opportunity.  The message being, you can be a part of this holy war that seeks to instal a Taliban style utopia that will make sure that you never have a job or get an education.  But numbers seldom lie, of the 455 people who have been publicly identified from around the world who have traveled or were arrested while attempting to travel to Syria to fight with a terrorist organization, an astonishing 36 of them were women from the West.  Thats remarkably 8%.  Even more remarkably is the fact that the mean age is only 18 years.  These women hail from Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Britain and the United States amongst other.  In many cases, they are going to Syria with the fantasy that they will marry the jihadist militant of their dreams.  Many of these aspiring so called "ISIS Brides" come from The United States.  In October 2014, three teenage girls from Colorado were intercepted at Frankfurt airport in Germany as they were trying to make their way to Syria to join ISIS.  I think that it is horrible that these three girls were planning to give away their lives at such an early age just to try to do something that momentarily seemed like a formidable idea.  The main message is that the phenomenon of females joining the jihad has become far more common in the past few years, and I see this trend continuing to grow unless our countries take some action on the subject matter.   

William Deo

Adapted From: 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/10/opinion/bergen-female-jihadists/index.html