From Brides to Battlefield, New Roles for Women With Islamic State

Erbil, Iraq:

Women travelling to join Islamic State militants are no longer just seeking to become "jihadi brides" but are taking on new roles, on the frontline in logistics and intelligence and as medics, according to military and expert sources.

Female presence in Islamic State's battles to establish a medieval-style caliphate across the Middle East has been unusual, with the radical Sunni Islamists imposing strict restrictions on women's dress and behaviour and deeming their role as domestic.

But as more foreigners, both male and female, go to join or fight Islamic State, the traditional role of women is being challenged, with reports of women working at hospitals controlled by Islamic State and aiding in logistics.

Colonel Rafat Salim Raykoni, head of a military intelligence unit in the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces battling Islamic State militants, said women fighters had emerged around the town of Sinjar, a frontline in the fight in northern Iraq.

"They are not many but they are starting to arrive on the frontline. Here in Sinjar they are very active," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

High-ranking commanders in different areas of Iraq and Syria are reporting Islamic State women around the battlefield, although so far no female militants have been reported killed.

Pareen Sevgeen, the commander of a Kurdish women militia in Iraq, YJA Star, was fighting north of Sinjar earlier this year when her brigade intercepted communications of the jihadis.

"We heard a woman giving order to men. She was saying move there or here, go left or right. She was obviously a commander," she said. "Arabic is not her first language. Our sources on the other side told us she is from India."

The London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) estimates at least 20,000 foreigners have joined the Syria/Iraq conflict of which about 4,000 are Western citizens. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue estimates about 550 of these are women.

So far most attention about the role of women in the conflict has focussed on those joining as "jihadi brides".

In one of the most high-profile recent cases, three British schoolgirls are thought to have travelled through Turkey to Syria in February to join the militant group. Their families and British authorities have made repeated appeals for them to return home.

Analysts refer to a recent manifesto by Islamic State's all-female Al-Khansaa Brigade whose mission is to pursue and arrest women who break the group's strict rules on Islamist morality.

This manifesto, translated by the London-based think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, maintained that women are permitted to abandon their domestic roles for jihad "if the enemy is attacking her country and the men are not enough to protect it and the imams give a fatwa for it".