ISIS Drawing More American and European Women To Its Ranks

When news broke this week that a 20-year-old Alabama woman (identified by her family only as “Hoda”) had left the United States to travel to Syria and join ISIS, many Americans were undoubtedly shocked.

They shouldn’t have been.

Hoda’s departure marked another chapter in what has become the new normal in the age of the Islamic State. Indeed, a startling number of young women and girls are leaving their comfortable lives in the West behind to join the most barbaric Islamic terrorist movement in modern history.

I’ve had my eye on this trend for a while–in Chapter Four (titled “Heartland Horror: The American Recruits”) of my latest book “ISIS Exposed,” I document several cases of Western females flocking to the caliphate–a place where women’s rights and equal pay are not exactly on the agenda. You want to see a real “War on Women?” Spend a few days in ISIS’s de facto capital, Raqqa, and see what happens if a woman wears heels or ventures outside uncovered.

What, then, is the attraction? I explored the motivations behind the Women of ISIS in my book and in a report for CBN News that aired in November 2014. That report is worth revisiting now that “Hoda,” who lived with her family in the quiet suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, has apparently made a new life inside the Islamic State.

Click on the viewer below to watch.