Recruiting troubled young women on various Websites and social media, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has found a convenient way of keeping their suicide-bombing work force happy, until called to make the ultimate sacrifice. Brainwashing recruits into the jihadist community to believe paradise follows martyrdom, ISIS recruits get a heavy dose of the pernicious indoctrination leaving few to escape after joining the world’s most deadly Islamic cult. Using the same recruitment methods as other religious and secular cults, ISIS has all the answers for why recruits, one brought into the fold, can never leave. New research shows that less that 30% of male recruits that change their minds get out alive. When it comes to women, that statistic drops to under 2%. Seeking abused, neglected and otherwise maladjusted teenage girls, ISIS knows how bring young women into the fold.
Promised with a new life of Islamic piety, serving a cause greater than themselves, the young women, regardless of age, are offered to male recruits as spouses, serving as sex slaves or anything else expected of them. Once joining ISIS, like other religious and secular cults, the female recruits have no rights, only to follow orders of their handlers or, if married, their spouses. Looking for structure, over 600 young women have joined ISIS, never to be heard from again. Since ISIS began seizing territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014, only two known ISIS female recruits made it out. With some 20,000 foreign fighters, ISIS desperately needs a fresh crop of naïve teenagers to meet the physical needs of its terrorist work force. Some 5,000 European recruits, largely from ghettoized areas of France, U.K, Belgium and the Netherlands, join ISIS out of despair, looking to lash-out at Western society.
ISIS recruiters on Websites and social media offer recruits and opportunity to join the ground floor of a new Islamic state, promising a life infinitely more fulfilling than the dead-end existence of Europe’s disenfranchised minorities, herded into suburbs after immigrating from the Mideast and North Africa. Once relocated to Europe, the hopeful immigrants get slapped in the face with the rude awakening of too few jobs, opportunities and a bleak future. ISIS gives recruits hope, especially young women hoping to escape from abusive circumstances, looking desperately for a way out of their current situation. “The lives of those teenage girls are very much controlled,” said British Muslim Sara Khan, warning young women through her group Inspire to beware of the potentially fatal risks. “I don’t even think those young girls have necessarily considered there’s no way back now,” said Khan
Only two young women, a Dutch teenager named Sterina Pelalo and unnamed 25-year old Brit, have made it out refusing to disclose how they managed to escape. Without reading much between the lines, it looks like their families paid hefty sums to human smugglers to get them out. How either girl made it way out of ISIS territory to cross back into Turkey is anyone’s guess. While the boys have a better shot of getting out, girls almost never find their way out. “I think they understand the premise of that, but not that they understand it in reality,” said Melanie Smith, a London’s King College researcher. When you consider the complications of teenage development, it’s the perfect group with the right combo of recklessness, identity confusion and impulsivity to get seduced into religious and secular cults. ISIS promises teenage girls a way out of their current agony—and their ready to go.
Once wed to ISIS fighters, teenage girls finds themselves pregnant quickly, isolated from the outside world, under 24-hour watch and nowhere to go other than indentured servitude to their ISIS spouses. “It’s particularly difficult for these families. For them, radicalization is happening on the Internet and outside the family sphere,” said Sebastian Pietrasanta, a French lawyer working to de-radicalize young people after indoctrination Pietasanta doesn’t get that teenagers become radical in dysfunctional families, where either smothered love or neglect fail to address basic emotional needs for acceptance and security. Maladjusted and vulnerable, teenagers are ripe for the picking to ISIS recruiters whether on the Internet or elsewhere. “For a girl of 14, I believe we can clearly save her from herself and save her from these barbarians,” said Pietsanta, talking about deprogramming.
ISIS employs all the same recruitment methods as other religious and secular cults, whether Scientology, Branch Davidians or followers of the Jim Jone’s Peoples Temple. Jones’ followers, like those of ISIS, found out quickly what happens when you don’t drink the cyanide-laced Cool-Aid, or in the case of ISIS, refuse to strap on the suicide vest: Summary executions. ISIS recruits are given access to Website to attract disturbed young women seeking love, acceptance and belonging. Once joining ISIS, there’s no turning back for the vast majority of teenage girls, finding themselves as dutiful Islamic spouses or sex slaves, until they show disobedience and wind up in a ditch. “We’ll find you, we have the best operators here, you don’t know what you’re getting into, you’re messing with a terrorist group, you and your family will pay,” said an ISIS teenage recruiter who didn’t get his way.
