Abstract
The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has succeeded in gathering an unprecedented level of female support worldwide. However, aside from a limited number of widely publicised acts of violence with high shock value committed by women, their participation in global jihad has primarily been in support roles, and these have long been regarded as secondary and passive. Despite growing recognition of the significance of female support for jihadist organisations and networks, these activities—carried out for the most part invisibly and in private, online and offline—remain under-researched in the German context for lack of empirical studies. That is the void into which this contribution ventures: As a case study of a radical female-dominated network in Germany, it explores the roles, activities and functions of women in support networks on the basis of an approach that combined qualitative case-file analysis and qualitative network analysis. Its main findings suggest that women’s support activities of various kinds contributed to initiating and strengthening social ties and connections that, in turn, played a fundamental role both in radicalisation processes and in the creation, expansion and maintenance of local and translocal structures of violence.
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Notes
- 1.
The organisation is known by various names, each with its own political implications—the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or simply Islamic State (IS)—as well as by the original Arabic acronym Da‘esh. The term used in this article, ISIS, identifies the organisation as a quasi-state jihadist actor.
- 2.
For the purposes of this article, jihadist organisations (such as ISIS) are defined as extremist politico-religious movements within Sunni Islam that set out to restore the “golden age” of Islam using force (Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center 2014: 36 ff.).
- 3.
According to German security agencies about 1,070 people left Germany after 2012 to join jihadist groups in Syria or Iraq. More than a quarter of them were (young) women. Numbers have fallen, however, since ISIS lost the territory it controlled (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz 2021). See also Heinke and Raudszus (2018: 41 ff.) or Heinke (2017: 17 f.).
- 4.
According to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution about one-third of the German men and women who joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq had returned to Germany (with their children) by 2019. Another 270 German women and children are in the custody of the Syrian Kurdish authorities as ISIS members (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz 2021).
- 5.
A good example in the German context was the Koran distribution campaign “Lies!” (Read) which served the purpose of making contacts and gathering recruits and was banned in 2016.
- 6.
The court files include the indictment, verdict, transcripts of police interrogations, witness testimonies and chat transcripts.
- 7.
Cases of terrorism-related charges under §129 StGB were identified through a systematic review of court press releases and media reports. The offences included recruiting members or supporters for a terrorist organisation abroad, supporting a terrorist organisation abroad, and membership of a terrorist organisation abroad.
- 8.
The overall network covers a period of four years. The criterion that determined the primary geographic classification of an actor in the network was his or her communication activities and the direction of these communication flows from Germany to Syria or vice versa. The difference between the total number of network actors and country assignments results from jihadist-motivated travel movements between Germany and Syria, which resulted in 57 individuals being recorded in both country contexts.
- 9.
These transcribed interactions—comprising 5,103 text messages, images and videos posted via Telegram (2,018), WhatsApp (1,892) and Skype (1,193)—offer significant insights into the private and thus presumably authentic interactions of actors.
- 10.
In the interest of preserving anonymity, exact locations are not indicated.
- 11.
Between 2011 and 2013 the estimated number of activists within the Salafist scene in Germany was 1,940 individuals. Between 2013 and 2017, the number grew by 5,060 but growth has slowed markedly since 2017 (Hildmann and Schmid 2020: 81).
- 12.
For detailed information on the development of the German Salafist scene, see e.g. Steinberg (2017: 11 ff.).
- 13.
The sources have been anonymised using letters unrelated to their true names.
- 14.
- 15.
In this particular network analysis, data were collated in two matrices documenting the relationships between the network-members, then processed using Cytoscape software. The first matrix indicates whether a relationship between network members exists or not and the second matrix represents the strength of the relationships between them. Binary numerical values (zero/one) were assigned between people in order to signify the level of intensity of their personal ties (strong/weak).
- 16.
All quotations are from sources translated from German.
- 17.
While not specifically tailored and addressed to women, this propaganda material does include elements that speak especially to women, as Pearson (2015) demonstrates in her analysis of the influence of the ideologists Abdullah Azzam and Anwar al-Awlaki on the radicalisation of a homegrown British female terrorist.
- 18.
As well as the example given here, matchmaking and marriage also took place through various channels, including internet forums and specific local mosques.
- 19.
When the woman located in Syria says it’s “It’s well loud here right now” she is referring to the sound of nearby fighting.
- 20.
For greater detail on the understanding of marriage in the Islamic tradition as a legally contracted agreement, concluded between two persons requiring freely given consent to the marital union and the fulfilment of specific criteria, see Ahram (2015: 68).
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Roth, V. (2022). Active Agents in the Private Sphere: A Women-Dominated Radical Support Network in Germany for the Islamic State. In: Ceylan, R., Kiefer, M. (eds) Der islamische Fundamentalismus im 21. Jahrhundert . Islam in der Gesellschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37486-0_12
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