The Crucial Role of Women within Islamic State

Manchester twins Zahra and Salma Halane travelled to join US
in 2014; they both married IS fighters but were widowed by the
end of the year

BBC: Whitehall officials have told the BBC that contrary to recent announcements, the number of Britons emigrating to Syria to live under Islamic State (IS) rule peaked two years ago. However, the proportion of women among those joining the extremist group has risen dramatically. So what's behind this and what exactly is the IS strategy behind luring women into their ranks? Our Security Correspondent Frank Gardner investigates.

Islamic State, also known as Isis, has a dual attitude to women.

On the one hand it treats those it considers heretics as almost sub-human, as commodities to be traded and given away as rewards to jihadist fighters.

Shocking footage from a modern-day sex-slave market in Mosul, Iraq, shows militants discussing prices for Yazidi girls, captured last year, many of them underage.

At least 2,000 Yazidi women are still being held, only a few have escaped.

'Corner stones'

"They put us up for sale," said one who did recently escape. "Many groups of fighters came to buy. Whatever we did, crying, begging, made no difference."

But on the other hand, IS has big plans for Muslim women who migrate to their territory to play a key role in building the so-called caliphate.

"They want women to join them," says Dr Katherine Brown, an expert in Islamic Studies at King's College London.

"They see women as the corner stones of the new state and they want citizens.

"What is really interesting is that people talk of IS as being a death cult, but that is the opposite of what they are trying to create... they want to create a new state... and they very much want women to join that as part of this utopian politics."

That utopia includes a treatise published in Arabic in February, setting out a code of conduct that harks back 1,400 years.

It is aimed primarily at Arab women in the Gulf states and the wider Middle East and includes passages that are incomprehensible to most people in the West:

"It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by 16 or 17, while they are still young and active," the treatise says. » | Frank Gardner, BBC Security correspondent | Thursday, August 20, 2015