Beginning in 2012, dozens of girls and women traveled to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State (IS), becoming brides of Islamic State fighters. While some traveled willingly, others were brought to Iraq and Syria as minors by their parents or family or forcefully.[1][2]
Many of those women subsequently acquired high public profiles, either through their efforts to recruit more volunteers, when they died or because they recanted and wished to return to their home countries. Commentators have noted that it will be hard to differentiate between the women who played an active role in atrocities and those who were housewives.[3]
Women who travelled to become an IS bride
Women who travelled to Iraq or Syria to become an IS bride
Name
Birth year
Date of joining
Status
Home country
Notes
Zagidat Abakarova
1985
2014
Repatriated to Russia in 2017, given a suspended sentence
Aden is a New Zealander and former dual Australian citizen who travelled to Syria in 2014 to join IS.
She was later found in Al-Hawl refugee camp, expressing a desire to return to Australia[13]
Due to her ties to IS, she was stripped of her Australian citizenship in 2020, which created friction in Australia-New Zealand relations.[14]
In February 2021, she was detained by Turkish authorities while trying to enter the country with her two children.[15][16][17] The Turkish Government subsequently dropped charges against her and began proceedings to deport her.[18]
In late Jul 2021, New Zealand Prime MinisterJacinda Ardern announced that the New Zealand Government would repatriate Aden and her children on the basis of their New Zealand citizenship.[19] She and her children arrived in New Zealand on mid–August 2021.[20]
Was able to travel to IS territory with her husband, Khaled Sharrouf, even though his passport had been cancelled due to an earlier conviction for terrorism.[63]
The couple brought their five children with them.
Sharrouf and two of their five children died from the same drone attack in 2017.
Brought to IS territory by her parents Tara Nettleton and Khaled Sharrouf at the age of thirteen,[63] at which age she was married to Mohammed Elomar, a jihadi fighter and her father's best friend.[66] On 24 June 2019, it was reported she had been repatriated to Australia, also rescued with her two children, age 2 and 3.[67]
Later gave birth in 2019 to a child fathered by her second husband, his fate is unknown[68]
Commanded "the Islamic State's Al-Khansaa Brigade, an all-female detachment that polices the group's strictures against wearing makeup or showing bare skin."[112]
Finnish media calls her "ISIS wife Sanna" (Finnish: Isis-vaimo Sanna) but her real name is unknown
Converted to Islam in 2005
Divorced her husband so he was able to take a second wife while living in Finland
Emigrated from Kotka, Finland to Manbij to join her husband and his second wife
Travelled with her four children, the eldest, a daughter born in 2005–2006, was married in Syria aged 13. The youngest was born in Syria.
Claimed her first husband died in a car accident, remarried after his death, second wife was returned to Finland after being arrested attempting to travel to Georgia
During the fall of IS in 2019, Sanna was interviewed by CNN near the final stronghold of Baghouz. As of 6March2019[update], she was in a refugee camp and wanted to return to Finland.
After the interview was published on 6 March 2019, Sanna's story was widely covered by Finnish media, starting a public discussion in Finland on possible return of Finnish citizens who emigrated to the IS war zone in Iraq and Syria.
With the help of Finnish authorities, she later was returned from the al-Hawl refugee camp to Finland with four children with her. Also a Finnish-Somali woman returned to Finland with two of her children on the same flight.[119]
Her father says she only travelled to IS-occupied Syria to find out what happened to her late husband.[133] Her family claims that once she arrived in IS territory, she was forced into marriage with a jihadi fighter.
Once married to a jihadi fighter, she made social media posts that seemed to support the IS regime.[134]
She has criticied IS's inability to provide health care, including pre-natal and obstetrics care.[135]
Reportedly killed in an airstrike with her children at some point before 2020[136]
Dabboussy says her husband tricked her into traveling to the Turkish-Syrian border with a claim they were going to help one of his relatives escape Syria, only to force her to cross the border, at gunpoint.[140][128]
Had three children, forced to remarry twice after her first husband's death[141]
Hafsa's father, Amor Sliti, took her mother, Hafsa, and her four younger siblings to Afghanistan, in 2000.[145] Her mother, Christine Volcke, fled, leaving Hafsa and her siblings with her father. Her father agreed to marry her to a member of the Taliban, when she was just 13 years old, and they had a child. After the American invasion of Afghanistan, in the fall of 2001, her husband ended up in the Guantanamo detention camp, and Hafsa, her father and her siblings ended up in an Iranian refugee camp. They were deported back to Belgium in February 2002. Hafsa and her siblings were put in the care of Volcke, her mother, while her father was tried and convicted of terrorism charges.
Her father was stripped of Belgian citizenship, and deported to Tunisia in 2010.[145] He traveled to the newly established IS, where he worked in the tax department. Hafsa joined him, in 2015. She married a jihadi fighter, and bore another child. She says that by 2017 she and her father had grown disillusioned with the brutality and corruption of the IS regime. She says they made three escape attempts, and that her father was shot and killed on the third attempt.
Hafsa says she is not a threat, and would prefer to be repatriated to Belgium, with her children, even if it meant serving a prison sentence.[145] She was given a five-year sentence in Belgium, despite still being in Syria.[146]
The Islamic State (IS), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and by its Arabic acronym Daesh, is a transnational Salafi jihadist group and an unrecognised quasi-state. Its origins were in the Jai'sh al-Taifa al-Mansurah organization founded by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in 2004, which fought alongside Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn during the Iraqi insurgency. The group gained global prominence in 2014, when its militants successfully captured large territories in northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria, taking advantage of the ongoing Syrian civil war. It is well known for its massive human rights violations and war crimes. It engaged in the persecution of Christians and Shia Muslims, and published videos of beheadings and executions against journalists and aid workers. By the end of 2015, it was internationally considered to be one of the biggest terrorist organizations of all time and it ruled an area with an estimated population of twelve million people, where it enforced its extremist interpretation of Islamic law, managed an annual budget exceeding US$1billion, and commanded more than 30,000 fighters.
Mulberry Academy Shoreditch is a comprehensive co-educational academy for students aged between 11–18 in the Bethnal Green neighbourhood of the Borough of Tower Hamlets in East London.
The persecution of Christians by the Islamic State involves the systematic mass murder of Christian minorities, within the regions of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya controlled by the Islamic terrorist group Islamic State. Persecution of Christian minorities climaxed following the Syrian civil war and later by its spillover.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the United Kingdom. British citizens have fought as members of the group, and there has been political debate on how to punish them. On 26 September 2014, Parliament voted to begin Royal Air Force airstrikes against ISIL in northern Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government, which began four days later, using Tornado GR4 jets. On 2 December 2015, the UK Parliament authorised an extension to the Royal Air Force airstrike campaign, joining the US-led international coalition against ISIL in Syria. Hours after the vote, Royal Air Force Tornado jets began bombing ISIL-controlled oilfields.
The Bethnal Green trio are Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana, three British girls who attended the Bethnal Green Academy in London before leaving home in February 2015 to join the Islamic State. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, they were among an estimated 550 women and girls from Western countries who had travelled to join IS—part of what some have called "a jihadi, girl-power subculture", the so-called Brides of ISIL. As of 2024, one girl has been reported killed (Sultana), one girl has been stripped of her British citizenship and denied re-entry into the country (Begum) while the third's fate is unknown (Abase).
Khaled Sharrouf was an Australian Jihadist who in 2013 travelled to Syrian territory to fight in the Syrian Civil War on the side of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 2017 he was the first Australian dual-national to have his Australian citizenship revoked under anti-terror legislation passed in 2015. In 2014, he posted an image to the Internet showing his seven-year-old son holding the severed head of a Syrian soldier, an act that was widely condemned.
The Battle of Baghuz Fawqani was an offensive by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), assisted by Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) coalition airstrikes, artillery, and special forces personnel, that began on 9 February 2019 as part of the Deir ez-Zor campaign of the Syrian Civil War. The battle—which was composed of a series of ground assaults—took place in and around the Syrian town of Al-Baghuz Fawqani in the Middle Euphrates River Valley near the Iraq–Syria border, and was the territorial last stand of the Islamic State (IS) in eastern Syria.
Shamima Begum is a British-born woman who entered Syria to join the ISIS terrorist group at the age of 15 and was consequently stripped of UK citizenship. As of 2024, she was living in al-Roj detention camp in Syria.
Hoda Muthana is a U.S.-born Yemeni woman who emigrated from the United States to Syria to join ISIS in November 2014. She surrendered in January 2019 to coalition forces fighting ISIS in Syria and has been denied access back to the United States after a U.S. court ruling rejected her claim to American citizenship. When she was born, her father was a Yemeni diplomat, making her ineligible for American citizenship by birth.
Aqsa Mahmood is a citizen of the United Kingdom, from Glasgow, who stirred controversy in 2013 when she was one of the first UK women to voluntarily slip into Daesh territory, when she was 20 years old.
Zehra Duman is an Australian-born Turkish woman who travelled to Daesh territory where she married a jihadi fighter. Born in Melbourne, Duman is reported to have been a friend of Tara Nettleton and Khaled Sharrouf, who travelled from Australia to Daesh territory, with their five children, in 2014. Duman's online recruiting activities have been the subject of scholarly attention.
Sharmeena Begum is a jihadi bride who left the United Kingdom to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in December 2014. Two months later, in February 2015, her school friends Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana joined her in occupied Syria. Begum is one of the youngest British teenagers to join ISIL.
Lisa Smith is a former Irish soldier who converted to Islam and later travelled to Syria during the Syrian Civil War to join the militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) during the Syrian Civil War. Born in Dundalk, she was a member of the Irish Army before transferring to the Irish Air Corps in 2011, but quit following her conversion to Islam. In 2015, following the breakdown of her marriage, she travelled to Syria to join ISIS. In 2019, she was captured and detained by the US forces in northern Syria. She was sentenced at the Irish Special Criminal Court on 22 July 2022 to 15 months in prison following her conviction on 30 May of membership of Daesh.
The al-Hawl refugee camp is a refugee camp on the southern outskirts of the town of al-Hawl in northern Syria, close to the Syria-Iraq border, which holds individuals displaced from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The camp is nominally controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) but according to the U.S. Government, much of the camp is run by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant who use the camp for indoctrination and recruitment purposes.
Foreign fighters in the Syrian civil war have come to Syria and joined all four sides in the war. In addition to Sunni foreign fighters arriving to defend the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or join the Syrian rebels, Shia fighters from several countries have joined pro-government militias in Syria, and leftists have become foreign fighters in the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Begum v Home Secretary [2021] UKSC 7 is the short name of three closely connected proceedings considered together in the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, R v Special Immigration Appeals Commission; R v Secretary of State for the Home Department; and Begum v Secretary of State for the Home Department, concerning Shamima Begum, a woman born in the United Kingdom who at the age of 15 travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Her intention to return to England in 2019 resulted in a public debate about the handling of returning jihadists.
Tania Joya is a British-American former jihadi and current counter-extremism activist who fled Syria after traveling there with husband John Georgelas to join the Islamic State, and asserted that she had an extramarital romantic relationship with US Representative Van Taylor, who subsequently acknowledged having a relationship and dropped out of a 2022 Texas runoff election.
Tareena Shakil is a British terrorist who is notable for being the first, and only, British woman convicted of having travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State. She was sentenced to six years' imprisonment in 2016 for willingly joining the terrorist group and for encouraging terrorist acts online. She had chosen to take her toddler son to Syria with her, and was later discovered to have made the one-year-old child pose with an AK-47 and wear Islamic State balaclavas for photographs. Both during and in the months before she travelled to join ISIS she posted content on social media supporting the Islamic State and justifying their actions, telling people to "take to arms". She messaged friends on the day she arrived in Syria saying that it was her 'responsibility' as a Muslim to kill 'murtadeen' apostates and that she wanted to die a martyr and carry out Jihad, yet would later claim that she had never agreed with killing anyone. Amongst other lies her trial judge concluded she made were her claims that she had not known that ISIS had committed atrocities before she went, her stories that she had been "kidnapped" to Syria, and what The Guardian described as her 'odd' claims that she had only put her child in an ISIS balaclava because the toddler "enjoyed wearing hats".
Mohammed Tasnime Akunjee is a British Bangladeshi criminal law and human rights lawyer, and a political commentator. He specializes in terrorism and related fields, and his notable works includes the 2019 defamation case against Tommy Robinson, the Almondbury Community School bullying incident, and the citizenship deprivation case between the British government and Shamima Begum. In January 2024, he declared intention to run as an Independent candidate for a Member of Parliament for the newly drawn Bethnal Green and Stepney constituency in East London, though he did not do so in the general election that July.
↑ "Jihadistes: la Turquie va expulser 11 prisonniers français"[Jihadists: Turkey will expel 11 French prisoners]. France TV Info (in French). 11 November 2019. Retrieved 20 August 2020. Parmi ces mères, Amandine, qu'une équipe de France 2 avait filmée en décembre 2018 dans le camp de Roj, au nord-est de la Syrie. Originaire du Calvados, elle s'est mariée à deux reprises, à chaque fois avec un jihadiste, et est mère d'un enfant. Elle va donc finalement rentrer avec son fils, mais comme les autres rapatriés, elle sera incarcérée sur le champ. En revanche, les enfants seront confiés aux services sociaux.
1 2 David Wroe, Josh Dye, Erin Pearson (4 April 2019). "What should Australia do with the children of Islamic State?". The Sydney Morning Herald. Al-Hawl refugee camp. Archived from the original on 8 April 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2019. Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age from al-Hawl camp, 16-year-old Hoda Sharrouf also says she forgives her father and mother, Tara Nettleton, for dragging her to Syria along with her four siblings when she was just 11 years old.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
1 2 3 Benita Kolovos; Rebecca Le May; Rebecca Gredley (24 June 2019). "Orphaned IS children on way to Australia". Newcastle Star. Retrieved 23 May 2020. The others are three children aged six to 12, who are the offspring of ISIS fighter Yasin Rizvic and his wife, Fauzia Khamal Bacha.
↑ Scott Glover (1 May 2017). "The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist". CNN. Archived from the original on 26 April 2019. Retrieved 26 April 2019. Greene's saga, which has never been publicized, exposes an embarrassing breach of national security at the FBI – an agency that has made its mission rooting out ISIS sympathizers across the country.
1 2 Tresa Baldas (2 May 2017). "FBI translator secretly married Islamic State leader". USA Today. Detroit. Archived from the original on 26 April 2019. Retrieved 26 April 2019. On June 11, 2014, Greene told an FBI supervisor in Indianapolis that she was traveling to Germany to see her family. She filled out the required form and listed "vacation/personal" as the reason for going. Her declared return date: July 4, 2014.
↑ Kirstan Conley; Gabrielle Fonrouge; Bruce Golding (3 May 2017). "FBI translator who married ISIS terrorist refuses to talk about tryst". New York Post. Archived from the original on 26 April 2019. Retrieved 26 April 2019. On Monday, Greene was revealed to have spent two years in the slammer for lying about a 2014 trip she took to Syria, where she hooked up with notorious German rapper-turned-ISIS recruiter Denis "Deso Dogg" Cuspert.
↑ Tresa Baldas (2 May 2017). "FBI translator in Detroit secretly married ISIS leader". Detroit Free Press. Archived from the original on 26 April 2019. Retrieved 26 April 2019. Amid the investigation, court records show, Greene fell in love with Cuspert, sneaked off to Syria in the summer of 2014, married him and warned him that "the FBI had an open investigation into his activities". She quickly became disenchanted – e-mailing an unnamed person that she had "made a mess of things" – and somehow managed to escape Syria and get back to the U.S., where she was arrested.
↑ Rukmini Callimachi, Catherine Porter (19 February 2019). "2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home". The New York Times. al Hawl Camp, Syria. p.A1. Archived from the original on 20 February 2019. Ms. Muthana and Ms. Polman acknowledged in the interview here that many Americans would question whether they deserved to be brought back home after joining one of the world's deadliest terrorist groups.
1 2 "Pakistani-origin ISIS brides lose British citizenship: Report". Hindustan Times. 11 March 2019. Archived from the original on 8 April 2019. Retrieved 14 March 2019. Reema Iqbal and her sister, Zara, have five boys under the age of eight between them and are being held in a Syrian detention camp. Reports of them losing their right to return to the UK after losing their citizenship rights come as it was confirmed that Bangladeshi-origin Shamima Begum lost her three-week-old baby in a Syrian refugee camp days after her British citizenship was similarly revoked.
1 2 "UK sisters who wed Isis fighters lose citizenship". London Times. 10 March 2019. Archived from the original on 30 March 2019. Retrieved 14 March 2019. Two more Isis brides from Britain held with their young children in squalid Syrian detention camps are believed to have been stripped of their citizenship amid a growing political row over the death of Shamima Begum's three-week-old baby.
↑ Paul Sperry (13 May 2017). "Meet the American women who are flocking to join ISIS". New York Post. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 21 February 2019. Some of these ISIS brides living in Syria and Iraq have made the terrorist watchlist. Arguably the most dangerous is Sally Jones, 49, a British Muslim convert who goes by the nom de guerre Umm Hussain al-Britani. She is reportedly now on a British special-forces "kill list" after threatening Queen Elizabeth II.
↑ Phyllis Chesler (8 April 2015). "ISIS "Jihad Bride" Propaganda Lures Foreign Women". Middle East Forum. Archived from the original on 19 March 2018. Retrieved 8 April 2019. Then, there is the scarcity of medical care. The wife of an ISIS fighter was totally ignored as her blood pooled on the hospital floor during a painful miscarriage. According to Kassab: 'She wasn't offered a chair or a bed and nobody even returned to check on her… The muhajireen (migrants) are also subjected to mistreatment and discrimination by the locals.'
↑ Livia Albeck-Ripka (24 October 2019). "Does Australia Have to Bring Its Women and Children Home From Syria's Camps?". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 July 2020. While the details of many of the women's stories are unknown, some have come forward to explain themselves, including Mariam Dabboussy. She says that in late 2015, she was forced by gunpoint over the Turkish border with Syria, after traveling there in what her husband claimed was an attempt to extract a relative who was trying to escape the Islamic State.
↑ Benedict Brook (1 October 2019). "From blushing Aussie bride to IS widow". The Chronicle. Retrieved 22 July 2020. A second Australian woman, Zara Ahmed, said security in the camp was continuing to deteriorate, with a woman's mutilated body found in the toilets. 'I'm so scared, I don't know how much longer I can do this for,' she said.
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