The jihadi sisterhood

‘Does the pin make me go 💥?’ Like most 16-year-old British schoolgirls, Safaa Boular was adept at using emojis. She wanted to ask her online mentor if, when she detonated a bomb belt, she could be sure of killing both herself and her target. Safaa was a fast learner and, before too long, was planning to involve her older sister and her mother in an attack on the British Museum, among other targets. So when she was found guilty this week at the Old Bailey, it confirmed the latest British jihad innovation: our first all-female terror cell. For those who have been involved in profiling terrorists (a job I used to do) it has all become a little more complicated. We’re used to hearing about naive girls being groomed by jihadists and going off to join them abroad in the role of the supportive, nurturing wife. It’s a story that has captured the imagination of novelists and filmmakers. The reality, however, is often far more brutal. The idea of women as suicide bombers is a subject of contention among jihadists. When Osama bin Laden published his 1996 fatwa against America, he instructed women to ‘instigate their brothers to fight in the cause of Allah’: to prepare the menfolk for martyrdom. Hamas flyers salute ‘the Mother of the Shahid’ (‘martyr’) and militants in Pakistan publish propaganda for women that lionises their dead sons. Even Islamic State has remained strikingly conformist in its approach to gender. Its unofficial 2015 women’s manifesto offered a simple slogan: that the ‘divine duty of motherhood’ awaits. The idea of women taking up arms, of pulling the pins on a suicide vest, had little official support. But in some cases, theological opposition to women in combat has been eroded because of their operational advantage —and propaganda value. Yusuf al-Uyayri, an al-Qaeda cleric, defended the first Chechen female suicide bomber Hawa Barayev in 2000 by invoking the Islamic principle that ‘necessity makes permissible the prohibited’.