With many of its men dead, ISIS turns to female fighters

Rahma Mahmud

The self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) increases dependence on women, having lost a large number of its male fighters in its battles.

By putting women in combat, the terrorist organization manages to camouflage and also compensate its huge male personnel losses.

A study published in September this year by IHS, a London-based company that provides information and analysis to support decision-making, showed that ISIS had lost a large number of its male fighters, especially during its latest battles in Syria and Iraq.

By depending on females, the study said, ISIS makes a major shift, given its hardline policy on women and the roles they can play in society.

It added that this development also reflected the enormity of the crisis within the terrorist organization.

Ludovico Carlino, a Middle East and North Africa expert at IHS Country Risk Division, said ISIS’s dependence on women was precipitated by the death of a large number of its fighters.

The extremists, he said, apparently want to make up for the losses they have sustained.

The pro-ISIS magazine, Rumiyah, talked, meanwhile, about the role women should play at critical times and the importance of their participation in wars.

ISIS had previously used women in carrying out suicide attacks. In the Battle of Mosul, women staged almost 40 percent of suicide attacks.

The Counter-Terrorism Committee at the UN Security Council issued a report in 2006 in which it said as many as 550 European women had joined ISIS.

Women, the committee said in the report, constitute almost a third of the members of the organization.

A separate 2016 study said women made up 17 percent of a total of 4,294 people who joined ISIS from 11 European states. Other women had joined the organization from central, south and west Asia, Africa and the Arab Gulf.

ISIS is active on Facebook and Twitter, despite the closure of thousands of its accounts on the two sites. It also increasingly depends on Telegram.

Women have formed what amounts to an electronic army within ISIS. Around 200 of the organization’s females appear on social media with codenames.