Women are being urged to abandon their home, family and life in secular countries, ignore any protestations from concerned relatives and travel to Iraq and Syria to join terror group Islamic State.
In a propaganda article for the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, making the journey is romanticized and equated to a religious pilgrimage “to the land of Islam and obedience.”
The tactic appears to be working to an extent, with increasing reports of women – including most recently a troubled Sydney mother who abandoned her two young children – travelling to Syria to join the terror group.
“I saw sisters who abandoned a beautiful home and luxurious car,” says the Dabiq article’s author Umm Sumayyah Al-Muhajirah, a suspected jihadi bride who denies it’s disadvantaged, deprived and psychologically vulnerable people joining Islamic State.
“[These woman] are as a fragile as glass bottles but their souls are those of men with ambitions almost hugging the heavens.”
Even when a pregnant woman’s baby reportedly died recently during delivery as a result of a difficult journey through three countries to get to the Islamic State’s frontline, this was described as “better for [the baby boy] than to die through the curriculum of the [non-Islam] schools.”
In another inflammatory article in the latest issue of the magazine, Al-Muhajirah justifies the rape of slave girls and describes US First Lady Michelle Obama as a prostitute.
She paints travelling to Syria as an adventure for women, describing it as a “long journey that is also exciting and full of memories” in which they move from “darkness to light.”
Talking to “laymen Muslim” families about making the trip, on the other hand, is “like butting a rock with your head,” she writes.
“Why do they not fear for their honour when the sister wants to travel to Paris or London to specialize in some worldly field of knowledge?”
Women can travel without a male relative “if she is able to find a relatively safe way”, Al-Muhajirah writes, and “should not wait for anyone but should escape with her religion and reach the land where Islam and its people are honoured.”
Towards the end of the article she admits some women at the frontline have suffered as their husbands “were killed, some were amputated, some were paralyzed and some were imprisoned” but says these wives were “firm like the firmest of mountains.”
According to news reports from Syria and Iraq, women face harsh and oppressive restrictions living under the rule of Islamic State and can be married from the age of nine.
