Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Five Podcast Five

    A Woman’s World within a Man’s World   “It’s not Sharia that men scream or talk to us in the street. It’s not. I feel increasingly sad here now. There is so little respect for us.” A foreign fighter   “I know it may be shirk [idolatry] but sometimes I do miss Starbucks. The coffee here is beyond wretched.” Western woman called GreenBirdofDabiq               By their own accounts, many female foreign fighters travel to the Caliphate to escape unwanted attentions of men. But, according to many tweets, Western women do not find the sanctuary they expect. For example, in August 2015, a Swedish woman moaned, “Seriously, I am getting so tired of many men muhajirin [emigrants] now. I feel harassed so often now. Women can’t do this or that. What is the point?”               British girls are urged to take lingerie with them as they travel to Syria to marry Islamic State fighters.  One blogger suggests that women should bring as much milk as possible, but that hair straighteners and deodorant are available. Many Western women never fully adjust to Jihadi living. They do not like to share their husbands with other women. Young women in search of benevolent and “caring” mother figures may be similarly lured. Sometimes they find them. But cowives are not always friends; they compete against each other for their husband’s affections and lovemaking and for prestige and place in the household. Some of the household chores have a morbid twist; for example, the more talented seamstresses are impressed into sewing suicide vests.             Sometimes Western girls and women are trapped in the Caliphate. Two early Western Caliphate volunteers were Samra Kizinovic (sometimes spelled Kesinovic) and her friend Sabina Clemovic (sometimes spelled Selimovic). Samra was sixteen and Sabina fifteen when they left their homes in Vienna in April 2014. First, they wanted to find husbands. The girls were very pretty, particularly Samra, who was given the moniker “Caliphate’s queen of beauty.”               The promised adventure soon turned sour. When they realized they had made a mistake, they contacted their parents and pled to go home. They never would return. According to Kurdish sources, Samra, the fair-haired, blue-eyed young beauty, was dead by summer 2015. Her friend would die, too. According to the source, they were beaten to death.             One woman who did make it out had a similar experience. Convert Sophie Kasiki, whose French husband was an atheist, traveled to Syria to live in “paradise.” She took their four-year-old son to look for “ISIS Prince Charming.” What she found was a prison, from which she eventually escaped. “I will always feel bad about taking my son to this hellish nightmare.” <B>Reason Two—Fear<\>             A second reason for wanting to leave the Caliphate is fear. Some Western men and women live in constant fear and would like to escape the Caliphate. One young man wrote, “They want to send me to the front, but I don’t know how to fight.” Westerners discover, often too late, that fellow Jihadis are killed for trivial offenses. Those who ask to return home are sometimes forced into suicide operations The Islamic State kills anyone from their own cadre who tries to leave. It has executed at least one hundred of its own foreign fighters who tried to flee Raqqa. Some make it out of Syria, but some are stranded in Turkey, where they are hunted down by agents of the State. By summer 2016, they were killing relatives of escapees. As one man said, “They got stricter as they worried we’d rebel, burning people alive and cutting people’s throats.”             Western fighters do not know whom to trust. One described the situation: “It [the Caliphate’s security and intelligence service(s)] is a highly organized body, with very strong discipline. Everybody spies on everybody else. ”There is cybersecurity. In the shadowy world, cybercafes are often the only way Westerners can communicate with their friends and family. For this reason, the Caliphate’s security operatives have installed keystroke-logging software.             In summer 2015, the Caliphate tightened surveillance over Raqqa, the Caliphate’s capital. One year later, Raqqa was under regular and armed guards, increased checkpoints, and tightened security. The Caliphate has counterintelligence capabilities and uses double agents to unmask those persons and groups it considers subversive or untrustworthy. They deploy cadre members in the streets and cybercafes to infiltrate underground networks that organize foreigners’ departures. They regularly use double-agent operations to trap would-be deserters. Without passports or the ability to speak Arabic, some Westerners are too scared to try to leave. Others just disappear.               This was the case with Zora, a girl from the French suburbs who left for Syria after turning fourteen. She had been recruited by three other women and, as of late 2015, lived in a communal setting with about fifty other girls and young women, mostly from Europe. They were heavily guarded and rarely permitted to leave their restricted living quarters. She and other females were, according to Zora, forced to watch beheadings and were often awoken by bomb blasts. She hoped to return to France, and her father offered to pay for anything. He sent her a scanned copy of her birth certificate in case she escaped. But he stopped hearing from her. “I call every morning. I’m waiting for her to get back online.”               Most escapees must reach Turkey, where consular offices can assist them. Defections began as a trickle and then poured by spring 2016. Defectors arrive in singles, doubles, or small groups, usually disheveled and desperate. As one would-be defector explained in June 2016, “We don’t know where to go. We want to go further away, but Europe is too expensive,” he said. “We know people are after us and want to kill us. We feel lost.”               Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, a twenty-five-year-old former Brooklyn resident, is also certain that Caliphate gunmen are determined to kill him. From Syria, he emailed the FBI to “extract” him and bring him home. In high school, he wrote glowing term papers on World War II leaders of democracy, Churchill and Roosevelt. Subsequently, he converted to Islam and the Caliphate; today, he misses democracy.    –