[MAGHAREBIA] Spanish authorities this month placed in durance vileDrop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un!
their first female Islamic State (ISIS) suspects.
The teenagers caught in Melilla are part of a growing trend. The girls, aged 19 and 14, had planned to cross into Morocco near Nador, and then contact a recruitment network that would send them to ISIS for jihad annikah
...Islamic whoredom. Proper Moslem women are expected to engage in 20-minute
marriageswith rutting Lions of Islam for the greater glory of Allen. Naturally, the Lions of Islam are expected to make a contribution to the holy men running the operation, say, twenty bucks or so, of which the Flowers of Islam get maybe five. They'd probably make out better in Amsterdam or Tijuana...
, the Spanish interior ministry said on Monday (August 4th).
The Maghreb region was first affected by the so-called "sex jihad" issue last year, when girls were willing to offer their bodies to al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria. Using religion as a lever, mysterious groups with even more obscure funding sources persuaded young women from Tunisia, Morocco and elsewhere to engage in '"temporary marriages" to mujahedeen.
The Islamic State group has been eager to adopt the practice.
Last month, Moroccan authorities arrested a 20-year old housemaid. She had met an ISIS member on Facebook and planned to meet and marry him in Syria. The jihadist promised to pay for her travel expenses, using his contacts in Marrakech. The plan was discovered by her female employer, who notified the police.
Another young Moroccan woman was not stopped in time.
Moroccan national and ISIS brigade leader Mohammed Hamdouch, aka "Kokito", brought a young woman from the kingdom to Syria. The 28-year-old groom, who recently appeared in a video cutting off the heads of five men, offered his bride a unique wedding gift.
According to Spanish daily El Pais, the former Fnideq clothing business manager gave the young woman a vest packed with explosives.
She was not brought from Morocco just for jihad annikah. She was also meant to be a human bomb.
While the use of women as jacket wallahs dates back to 2004, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led al-Qaeda in Iraq, the practice has grown increasingly popular.
Last April, ISIS announced the opening of training camps for women in Syria. After that, it formed two brigades for female fighters: Al-Khansaa and Umm Rayyan.
The trend of using young women as suicide bombers isn't restricted to ISIS. On July 30th, Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
attacked a college campus in Kano. It was the fourth time in the same city for Boko Haram to use female bombers.
"These cases show that recruitment networks working for ISIS and similar terrorist organizations are now focusing on women," says Abdelmajid Hachadi, a Moroccan journalist who specialises in jihadist movements.
"Therefore, the security authorities need to adapt their tools, find new gender-based counter-terrorism mechanisms and take more appropriate and effective measures to confront the recruitment of women," he tells Magharebia.
After ISIS took control of swathes of land in Iraq and Syria, it had to change its focus, Hachadi notes.
"The priority now for the Islamic State is not to recruit new fighters, but to create suitable circumstances for it to keep the fighters who have already joined. One way is to meet fighters' needs for women, in the framework of the so-called jihad annikah."
The group is also looking for a different kind of male recruit, he adds.
"In the past, the Islamic State, like other global terrorist groups, focused recruitment on desperate youths from marginalised, poor neighbourhoods in big cities, where the anger, hatred and despair of unemployed and disadvantaged people could be easily exploited to turn them into fighters and suicide bombers," he explains.
But as ISIS chief His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us...
made clear in his first speech after declaring himself "caliph", the terrorist organization is now seeking "cadres who belong to the middle class - doctors, engineers, oil and chemical industry experts, and management professionals - so they can run the areas it has seized in Iraq and Syria", Hachadi says.
This marks a "radical change in the methods, means and approaches used by the terrorist organization's recruitment networks, and requires the security authorities to adapt their tools and approaches", he tells Magharebia.
But Moroccan professionals are unlikely to heed al-Baghdadi's call, says Yucef Rateb, a management and business administration professor.
"It would be illogical for them to relinquish the professional and social standing that they've worked hard to achieve, just to follow the illusions that ISIS is promising them," the professor says.
Professionals seek a "stable environment where security, reassurance, development and prosperity prevail", Rateb adds, "but this is not available in areas controlled by ISIS, where they engage in killings, looting and sabotage".
"ISIS is calling for a new religion based on accusing all of kufr, large-scale killings and slaughters as a means to reach 'their paradise.' ISIS' economy is based on conquest, looting and spoil, and this is in contradiction with Islam which calls for co-operation among people, regardless of their races and religions, and for good work, to realise luxury and prosperity for all members of society," the professor notes.
Meanwhile,
...back at the comedy club, Boogie ducked another tomato...
Moroccan security authorities are proceeding with their battles against terrorist networks. On August 4th, a court ordered the detention of five terror members of a Fez recruitment cell. The defendants, including a minor, are accused of committing armed robberies in order to send fighters to Syria and Iraq.
Security services have also intensified their monitoring of money transfers. The move comes after Sherlocks learned that ISIS was planning to open new channels to fund activities in Morocco.