Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast Three

For the first two years of the Caliphate’s existence, it was easy for Westerners to travel to its cities. Security services did not expect the lure of the Caliphate, and man border controls in Europe had been removed. From 2014 to early 2016, it was relatively easy for those with support and guidance to travel from most European cities to the Caliphate.             A Daily Mail undercover sting operation, undertaken in coordination with the London police, demonstrates the ease of travel and the assistance provided to the traveler at each step of the journey. A journalist posing as a fixer for the State advertised on Twitter, Kik, Surespot, and Telegram. A young woman living in Syria responded and asked the undercover journalist to help transport her sixteen-year-old sister to Syria. The fixer and the Jihadi’s sister would meet at a fast-food restaurant in niqabs, book a holiday to Basle, Switzerland, and pay with it on the fixer’s credit card. They would pack secretly and leave before dawn, dressed in Western attire. From Switzerland, they would book a one-way trip to Istanbul. From Istanbul, they would take a bus to Gaziantep, where they would be met by the State’s fixers. They would be escorted to a safe house, where they would be introduced to the man who would be the girl’s husband. However, police had been monitoring this from the outset and made arrests as a result.               Travel from Europe is not expensive. A cheap flight from the continent to Turkey can cost as little as $150. In 2014, 2015, and 2016, a visa was generally not required to enter Turkey, the gateway to Syria. Smugglers ferrying pistachios, food, sugar, and fuel also transport Jihadis. Some of the smugglers act out of solidarity, others have mercenary motives, and still others do it because the State pressures and threatens them. Women Hear the Caliphate’s Call   “Keep it Halal and get married.”               There has long been a mystique associated with European women and the Islamic world. Stories of young, blonde beauties captured by Muslim pirates and imprisoned in harems were imagined in penny-dreadful Victorian novels and on the canvases of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. Mozart had some musical fun with a harem in his opera Abduction from the Seraglio. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired girls and women were historically prized captives for Muslims. And today, European-appearing female captives fetch a handsome price in the Caliphate as sex slaves. However, only rarely did women voluntarily forgo European or American lifestyles to live as traditional Muslims in the Islamic world. But history does record several.               Margaret Marcus was a well-to-do New Yorker who, as an adolescent, dreamed of a “new golden age” of Jews and Muslims. In early adulthood, she became tormented by schizophrenia. She converted to Islam and tried to build a new life in Pakistan, but her mental illness continued to stalk her there, too.               A love-smitten twentysomething, Phyllis Chessler, followed her poetry-reciting Afghan sweetheart to Kabul and found herself trapped in a harem. She escaped to write a memoir about it. So did Betty Mahmoody, who fled Iran, as recounted in the docudrama Not Without My Daughter. These women learned, too late, that their husbands, like many men in the Islamic world, held deeply ingrained traditional Islamic values.               This makes the Islamic State’s allure perplexing. In the Islamic world and in Western Islamic enclaves, girls and women can be psychologically or physically tormented for wearing fashionable clothes and makeup, for befriending non-Muslim schoolmates, and for demanding to chart their life’s course. Most horrific are “honor killings,” in which family members collude to snuff out the lives of women and girls, often in the flower of their youth. Flirtations, idle chatting with boys or men, and being seen with males to whom they are not related can be serious, sometimes capital, offenses for girls and women in traditional Islamic families.               Women nevertheless journey to the Caliphate. Some come to Raqqa to find husbands, expecting an avalanche of manly suitors. Others travel to assume leadership roles and develop skills. As an analyst notes, “The girls go around making cookies. It’s almost like a Jihadi Tupperware party.” Anne Birgitta Nilsen, an associate professor at Oslo University College, researched the Facebook activity of European women who want to join the State. She pointed out the “gentle” day-to-day nature of information operations. The Caliphate’s media operations show children playing in schoolyards. And then there is sex. .