MOSCOW, September 15 (RIA Novosti) – US law enforcement agencies are investigating reports that several American women of Somali origin have run away from home to join Islamic State (IS) militants, Reuters reports.
Three families have said that a number of their female relatives have gone missing in the past six weeks. They fear that the women might have joined the radical Sunni group that controls large parts of Iraq and Syria, said Abdirizak Bihi, a local community leader. The girls remain at large and no details are available at this point.
Their families came to the US from Somalia and currently live in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul urban area, home of the largest Somalian community in the country. Islamists have targeted immigrants from the African country since 2007 when al-Shabab, a radical group responsible for the deadly attack on a shopping mall in Kenya last year, started recruiting in the Twin Cities area.
The first known female recruit from the US who has joined the IS in Syria is a 19-year-old woman of Somalian origin from the Minneapolis-St Paul area. Her name has not been made public, but it has been disclosed that she ran away on August 25.
“The nature of the recruitment of these crazy organizations is how they use the element of surprise. Now they have surprised us again by going for the girls,” Bihi told Reuters. The US authorities believe that women were recruited in local mosques.
Women view traveling to the Middle East as an adventure that would bring meaning and excitement to their otherwise dull lives, experts say. “Given the choice of a fairly mundane life in a second-tier job in the West, and this rather heroic and romantic image of jihadi life being portrayed by Islamic State propaganda, which is very well crafted, in a paradoxical way this gives women a sense of agency and empowerment,” Sasha Havlicek, founder of the London-based Institute of Strategic Dialogue, told the Washington Post.
At least 100 US citizens have gone to Syria to fight with the radicals according to Pentagon estimates.
