The conversation
How Women War – A Brief History of ISIS Brides, Nazi Guards and FARC Insurgents
The names of American Hoda Muthana and Brit Shamima Begum have appeared in numerous headlines in the United States and Europe since these two women members of the Islamic State group were discovered in a large IDP camp weeks ago. Women were among the strongholds of the last Islamic State stronghold in Baghouz, Syria. When they were found by journalists, one was pregnant and the other looking after her young son. In the four years that these women have lived as part of the IS, they have gone from a self-described idyll in the IS capital, Raqqa, to escape air strikes with little more than the clothes on their backs. Now, as young mothers, they have been considered iconic IS brides, evidence of the group’s ability to distort the minds of vulnerable teenagers. In several interviews, these two women have wholeheartedly adopted this narrative. “When I went to Syria, I was just a housewife for the entire four years – stayed at home, took care of my husband, took care of my children,” Begum told Sky News. Although Muthana incited the murder of Americans on Twitter, according to the reports of these women, they did not participate in IS violence. They didn’t even see it. A story of impunity We’ve heard this story before. As Wendy Lower painstakingly details in “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Kill Fields,” about half a million German women followed their husbands or offered to colonize the territory conquered by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe. Women on the Eastern Front were essential to the expansion of the Nazi state, serving in important administrative, logistical and medical functions. Some of these Nazi women have also committed horrible crimes. Some 5,000 served as concentration camp guards. Approximately 10,000 women were assistants to the SS, or Helferinnen, serving in a bureaucracy that murdered millions in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. A total of 7,900 women were employed at SS Frauenkorps, where those who worked as secretaries often decided which political prisoners would end up on the day’s death lists. Thousands of Nazi nurses helped with hideous medical experiments and euthanasia. However, like most women in the IS, Nazi women were not involved in armed combat. They clung to the gender roles and identities that National Socialism had created for them as wives and mothers. As the Third Reich collapsed around them, most Nazi women in the East fled and returned to their previous lives in Germany. Of the few who were arrested, only a small part faced justice. After a military trial, the UK executed one of these women – Irma Grese, a 22-year-old Bergen-Belsen guard. But the vast majority of Nazi women have never been held responsible for their crimes, in Germany or abroad. Insurgent women The roles assigned to women in Islamic State and Nazi Germany as wives and mothers, first, and perpetrators of violence, second, differ from the experiences of most women in armed groups. In “Women Insurgents: Women Combatants in Civil Wars”, Alexis Henshaw, Ora Szekely and I detailed the participation of women in conflicts in Colombia, Ukraine and in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East. Women in rebel groups in these contexts often participate in fighting, in addition to communications, logistics and other support functions. In Colombia’s FARC, women were first mobilized with their families as wives of combatants. Only later were women allowed to take up arms, making up between 30 and 40 percent of the FARC’s fighting force. Unlike the IS, which encouraged women to give birth to increase the caliphate’s population, the FARC heavily regulated women’s fertility and sexual relations. Forced abortions and abandoned children were accepted as the cost of victory. In contrast, many women who took up arms against the Ukrainian military in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine did so precisely because they were mothers. Women in these pro-Russian separatist groups often say that they are fighting to protect their families and their homeland, having been abandoned by men who are avoiding recruitment by both sides of the conflict. Yelena Dustova, a mother of three, 39, said: “What, should I allow them to shoot me in my city? No. I will stay here so that they are not allowed to pass. I am with my mother and children there. ”As our book“ Women Insurgents ”details, rebel women in the Donbass see no tension between their duties such as directing tanks, equipping checkpoints or serving as snipers and their roles as daughters, mothers and wives. Holding women accountable Women’s roles in armed groups vary. But largely because of their ability to blur the line between civilians and combatants, women’s often invisible contributions to the conflict may be the key to the success of an armed group. The mobilization of more than 4,700 women like Shamima Begum and Hoda Muthana by IS was unprecedented because they were foreigners. But women’s participation in violent projects to rebuild their societies is more common than we think. Tens of thousands of Nazi women have escaped justice. This historic precedent must be considered as governments decide how they will hold ISI women accountable for their crimes. This article was republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. Read more: * Closing the gender gap in the life sciences is a difficult struggle * Shamima Begum: how Europe has hardened its stance on women returning from Islamic State * Will terrorism continue to narrow in 2019? Jessica Trisko Darden is a Jeane Kirkpatrick fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.