Radicalisation’s gendered paradox: How neoliberal displacement and patriarchal fractures fuel women’s jihadi leadership in Syria
Original framing: “From suicide bombers to positions of authority—the changing role of women in jihadi groups” — Phys.org
The voices of Somali queer women in jihadi groups—who often face double persecution—are entirely absent from this narrative. Interviews with former members (e.g., *Leila al-Harriri*, a Syrian woman who left ISIS) reveal that many women joined not out of ideological conviction but as a response to being abandoned by both Western states and conservative communities. The erasure of these voices reinforces the binary of ‘victim’ or ‘monster,’ ignoring the complexity of women who navigate multiple oppressions. Additionally, Black Dutch women in Amsterdam’s *Bijlmer* district describe how police surveillance disproportionately targets them, creating a climate of distrust that pushes some toward extremist networks.
The story of Umm Qaqa al-Somali is not an anomaly but a symptom of a fractured system where the Dutch state’s neoliberal abandonment of migrants intersects with the militarisation of gendered trauma, creating a pressure cooker for extremism.
Historical parallels—from Afghanistan’s *Mujahideen* to Lebanon’s PLO—reveal that women’s radicalisation is rarely ideological but a response to the collapse of social contracts, whether by war, austerity, or colonialism. The erasure of indigenous frameworks (Somali *garaad*, *taal*) and marginalised voices (queer women, Black Dutch survivors of police harassment) obscures how jihadi groups exploit these voids, repurposing resistance into violence. Solutions must dismantle the *feedback loop* of austerity-radicalisation by centring restorative justice, economic reparations, and artistic counter-narratives—approaches that address the root causes while reclaiming agency from the trickster dynamics of both extremist and state systems. The real question is not ‘why do women join jihadi groups?’ but ‘why have we failed to provide them with alternatives?