In the recent months, it has become nearly impossible to watch the news without seeing a headline that screams “ISIS.” The militant Islamic extremist group has been causing widespread fear after committing several public acts of terror, including releasing a video recording of the beheading of US Army Vet and Aid Worker Peter Kassig. ISIS has also had a disturbing effect on several young Western Muslim women.

In November of 2013, Aqsa Mahmood, a 19-year-old from Glasgow, UK, left her family, affluent neighborhood, and first-class education behind to join the rebel movement in Aleppo in Northern Syria. According to Aqsa’s parents, “She was the best daughter you could have. We just don’t know what happened to her. She loved school. She was very friendly” (CNN.com). Aqsa’s parents also insist that there were no signs indicating that Aqsa harbored extremist beliefs.

How then, did a girl who helped her handicapped grandmother, read Harry Potter, and “was afraid of the dark,” develop into an extremist?

According to CNN.com, Aqsa was, and still is, prolific on social media, specifically twitter where she “advocates for ISIS and Islamic caliphates” and attacks on Western countries. Family lawyer Aamer Anwar explained that Aqsa was a “bedroom radical,” and was most likely influenced by watching online sermons and meeting people online who proposed, and then initiated the trek from Glasgow to Syria.

Aqsa’s parents keep in touch with their daughter through online chats and share that she joined the movement in hopes of becoming a martyr. Despite a public appeal to Aqsa to return home, her family still remains in agony; and with an additional fear. According to her father, Aqsa sent a message with the news that due to local custom, she was obliged to find a husband, or “mahram,” (male guardian), essentially making Aqsa an “ISIS bride,” an unfortunate trend that has grown in the past year and a half since Aqsa’s disappearance.

According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, at least 550 Western Women have fled to Syria to join ISIS and other Islamic terrorists. Most recently two 15-year-old girls and one 16-year-old girl from the Bethnal Green Academy in London have fled home and have reportedly been seen on various airport feeds boarding a plane from Turkey to Syria.

Why do these girls go? What motivates them? Law Professor Jayne Huckerby of Duke University’s International Human Rights Clinic explains that in many cases, they leave for “the same reason as men.” These women “celebrate the violence of ISIS unequivocally,” sharing their fascination on social media.

Additional factors contributing to the trend include alienation and discrimination as young Muslim women in Western society or simply “a sense of adventure,” sparked by the “sanitized” version of ISIS on social media.
Unfortunately, for women who arrive and find that life as an ISIS bride is not as expected, “there’s little hope to undo the mistake,” says Huckerby. “There are women who are going there and finding the reality is not what they were sold on social media by ISIS, and they want to come back, but government policies at the moment are not encouraging return.”