Offering new insight into life of women in the Islamic State, a document called “Women of the Islamic
State: Manifesto and Case Study” tries to clarify the role of women in the Islamic State.
Written in Arabic, the manifesto was uploaded online last month by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade, an all-female branch of the Islamic State. An English translation was published Thursday by the Quilliam Foundation, a London-based counter-extremism think tank.
“It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by sixteen or seventeen, while they are still young and active,” the document said.
Girls should be educated from 7 – 15 years old, with the focus on religion, the manifesto reads. Girls are also to be taught sciences, child rearing, cooking, textiles and knitting.
The guide repeatedly criticizes Western society, saying “the model preferred by infidels in the West failed the minute that women were “liberated” from their cell in the house.”
The Quilliam Foundation said the document was the first of its kind, and that one of its main aims was to convince readers of “a fundamental necessity for women to have a sedentary lifestyle.”
The translated manifesto landed the same day as a scathing report by a group of British lawmakers who said that U.K. efforts in fighting Islamic State extremists were “strikingly modest.”
In the highly-critical report, Britain’s Defence Select Committee said they were “surprised and deeply concerned that the U.K. is not doing more” to fight extremists in the Islamic State, which they said was the “most dramatic and significant threat to regional stability, and international security, to have emerged in the Middle East in decades.”
Since last September when the British government voted in favor of military air strikes in Iraq, the U.K. has carried out 6 percent of coalition airstrikes. It has also provided weapons to Kurdish forces fighting in northern Iraq.
The committee said that even without deploying combat troops — for which there is very little public appetite in London — the U.K. could be doing much more strategically and tactically to fight extremists and to help find a political solution.
“Such activities would require only the deployment of a few hundred personnel, the cost would be relatively modest, and it would not entail the risks inherent in deploying to U.K. troops in combat roles,” the report said.
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