‘If we really had been ticking time bombs, that time bomb would have exploded by now.’ With these words, a group of Belgian women respond to the persistent image that continues to haunt them. In the VRT NEWS podcast “Vrouwen van IS" (Women of IS), they recount – years after their return from IS territory – how they became radicalised, why they travelled to Syria and what they experienced there.
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Four Belgian IS women speak out for the first time: "We are not ticking time bombs”
Colin Clapson
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'Vrouwen van IS ' (Women of IS) is a VRT NEWS podcast in which four women speak out for the very first time about their experiences with the terrorist group IS in Syria and Iraq. They explain why they made that choice, how it all unfolded and how they look back on it now.
Three of the four women who speak in the podcast have since served their sentences. The fourth was eventually acquitted. As they are now trying to rebuild their lives, they speak under pseudonyms.
Between 2012 and 2015, around 500 people left our shores for Syria and Iraq to join violent Islamist groups there. This made Belgium, relatively speaking, one of the largest sources of Syria fighters. Among those who left were 112 women.
Amira, Dounia, Zeyneb and Katrien were four of them. Their stories are sometimes very different and thus provide a good picture of the IS women. Sometimes they are portrayed as passive followers who had no choice but to follow their husbands. At other times, they are described as ticking time bombs who were themselves ideologically driven.
“Looking back on it now, I can see that I was radicalised,” Dounia reflects. “It didn’t happen overnight. I was grappling with questions about my faith, and eventually I was surrounded only by people who took a very strict view of it.”
Like Amira, she belonged to the group Sharia4Belgium, which was mainly active in Antwerp and Vilvoorde. Sharia4Belgium tried to recruit Muslims by preaching on the streets. Their aim? To turn Belgium into an Islamic country, where a strict version of Sharia, Islamic law, would apply. They disrupted lectures and became involved in street riots.
Sharia4Belgium was eventually disbanded at the end of 2012 when its leader, Fouad Belkacem, was arrested and convicted.
The red carpet to Syria
Several members then decided to continue their struggle in Syria. A bloody civil war between dictator Bashar Assad and various armed groups was raging. “At that point, we weren’t turning our backs on the West; we simply wanted to go and help other Muslims,” Amira and Dounia say.
They left together with their husbands and brothers. “The only thing missing was a red carpet”: that’s how simple it was, according to Amira.
Zeyneb was 16 at the time and in a difficult situation. She was abused at home and spent part of her childhood in care homes. “Things happened there that shouldn’t have happened,” she says. She fell under the influence of classmates who were part of Sharia4Belgium, and after yet another row with her mother, she left for Syria.
‘There, I suddenly saw all these men with long beards and Kalashnikovs, and I realised: oh no, now I’ve really gone too far.’ She is forced to marry a man from Belgium and have children by him.
Finally, Katrien converted to Islam later in life. When she found it harder to get work because of her headscarf, she left for Syria with her Dutch-Moroccan husband. ‘We thought we could live freely there, but reality soon turned out to be completely different. They told us we could never return.’
Gruesome executions and attacks
And certainly once the terrorist group IS came to power in 2014, the horror only increased. ‘There I saw things that I never wanted to see,’ says Dounia. She and Zeyneb describe how they witnessed executions, with people being thrown from tall buildings. And how they saw decapitated bodies lying at a major roundabout in the centre of the city of Raqqa.
They were regularly shown propaganda videos about the attacks IS carried out in Belgium and France and other places: "The Belgians were very proud of that too. They felt they were taking revenge for the injustices done to them in Belgium. And they didn’t care that their own families were still there and could potentially be victims. 'They chose to stay there. If anything happens to them, so be it.' That was their reasoning."
Zeyneb also recounts how, at one point, a 14-year-old girl came to live with her. It turns out she was a Yazidi girl, a group of people regarded by IS as devil-worshippers. A friend of her husband had enslaved the girl, and whilst he is away, the girl had to live with Zeyneb, who is 18 herself. She describes how the girl is mistreated and abused by the Belgian man.
Eventually, the tide turns against the terrorist group IS, and their caliphate comes to an end. Amira, Dounia and Zeyneb manage to flee to Turkey and return via the Belgian embassy. Katrien is one of the women later repatriated by the Belgian authorities from a prison camp.
In search of peace and a new start
Zeyneb is eventually acquitted because she was still a minor when she left. The other three women have served their sentences.
“Above all, I feel terribly guilty towards my children,” says Dounia. “They’ve fallen behind compared to others; they’re still struggling with angst. I feel so stupid for letting myself be led astray by such terrible people. It was as if I’d ended up in a cult.”
Katrien just wants some peace and quiet now: ‘I can’t undo what I did. But it still has very serious consequences to this day. Other Muslims also confront me, because we made a mockery of their faith and have caused all Muslims to be viewed in a negative light. It’s been a serious life lesson.’
The Belgian state organisation that monitors the threat level, the OCAD, is fairly certain that virtually all the women who have returned are now on the right path. They all seem to have renounced violence. In Amira’s words: “If we really had been ticking time bombs, that time bomb would have exploded by now. Of course, I have to be careful, because I can’t speak for every woman. But above all, we now want to be able to live quietly and in peace and seize the new opportunity we’ve been given.”