Last week 3 young girls from Great Britain boarded a plane to Turkey to join the ISIS movement and to marry fighters. The three girls, between the ages of 15 and 17, are from London and told their parents that they were going to spend the day together when, in reality, they were on their way to Syria. The media has described them as “straight-A students” who didn’t seem to be in any danger. The girls were interviewed by Scotland Yard after another girl from the same school had joined ISIS last year and the recommendation was made that they were not in any danger. How is it possible then, that no one in those girls’ lives realized what was happening and how is it that these young women want to join a movement that is known for its brutality and violence? According to the Time there are an estimated 30 European women have either joined their jihadist husbands in Iraq and Syria or have gone to marry a fighter. These girls are not the first ones to have gone. There were two Austrian girls, aged 15 and 16 and 16-year-old British twin sisters who have gone.

It has been speculated whether or not it is the influence of social media that makes those girls join. At first, the radical movement highly discouraged women joining but rather urged them to support the movement by donating or getting their menfolk to join. However, when the movement came closer to its goal of establishing an Islamic state, they realized that women were   needed to help the state thrive. Their campaign to recruit women was mostly through social media and women who had joined the movement were the ones leading those sites. It is these women, for example, who connected with the 3 young teenagers from Great Britain and convinced them to come to Syria. It needs to be clear though, that those women make the girls understand from the very beginning what their roles in this new society are. One woman wrote on her Tumblr blog a quote from a Salafist website that states, “The best of women are those who do not see the men, and who are not seen by men.” The main role of these girls is to support their husband and to increase the Islamic state. Whatever the reasons are that young adults and women decide to join the radical movement, once they are in, there is no turning back.