Why teenage girls are giving up everything to join the Islamic State terrorist group?

Teenage girls are giving up the pleasures and freedoms of young adulthood to join Islamic State, and parents and authorities are trying to understand why.

To gain an insight, Iranian-American writer Azadeh Moaveni interviewed 13 young Jihadi brides for her latest book Guest House For Young Widows — girls who chose to abandon their families and comfortable lives to travel to war zones and marry ISIS fighters.

The girls whose stories she tells are from various countries, but what they all shared was a sense of isolation and rejection, Moaveni told Studio 10.

“If there’s one thing that binds them all together is that they were all starting to feel excluded and felt they didn’t have a place in their home societies, whether that was London, Berlin, or Arab countries,” she said.

“That feeling of exclusion… that there was no other pathway to try and meet the desires and aspirations they had.

“The sense of being excluded was something ISIS tapped into in such a sophisticated way country-to-country, with what I would say is bespoke messaging.”

One of the cases which gained relentless media attention was that of three teenage school girls — Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana — from Bethnal Green, in east London, who dropped everything to go to Syria.

Moaveni, who is also the author of Lipstick Jihad, Iran Awakening and Honeymoon in Tehran, described how the girls’ stories were “incredibly poignant ” because they were the “last girls you would imagine” could be susceptible to this type of grooming and manipulation.

She described them as bright, popular girls who had promising futures ahead and were liked by their teachers.

However, Moaveni noted they were from immigrant backgrounds and their parents were still trying to adjust to life in the UK, so they didn’t see it as a “dangerous signal” that their daughters started dressing more conservatively or isolated themselves, because many teenagers do.

She added the parents assumed their daughters were trying to ensure they didn’t lose their culture in a liberal British society when they also started attending the mosque more often.

“The warning signs were read by the parents as a safe signal,” Moaveni said, adding that the had no idea who the girls were meeting or talking to.

“They weren’t quite equipped for 21st century London parenting, which is very different to village parenting in the likes of Bangladesh or Pakistan.”

The girls had created a sisterhood and were recruited by someone operating out of east London before they were eventually seduced into going to Syria.

They were just 15 and 16 at the time.

“We must bear in mind they were teenagers so this idea that they were making informed choices is not one we think about regarding girls who are being recruited into an armed group,” Moaveni explained.

Source: Daily 10