Are women who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islamist extremism—jihadism—victims or perpetrators? How you answer this question influences how women who joined the Islamic State (IS/ISIS) are treated by the legal system, the public, and policymakers. Efforts to repatriate the hundreds of women with North American, European, or Australian citizenship held in overcrowded camps in Syria have come up against security concerns that they might continue to perpetuate ISIS’s ideology and vengeful public sentiments. Many of the women burned their passports or had their citizenship revoked. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations and law firms supporting the women argue that they are victims of ISIS’s brutal treatment of women.

The victim narrative starts with the idea that, in fundamentalist Islam, women are controlled by men because the religion itself denies women agency. The clothing rules about veiling, especially the burqa, are often viewed as clear evidence of the oppressive nature of the political ideology tied to Islamist religious extremism. Variations of the victimization argument emphasize trauma and other psychological factors that made the women vulnerable to recruitment. Not all, but many of the women who joined ISIS, were young teenagers, and others were women with histories of abusive relationships. Some analysts have observed the similarities between ISIS’s online recruitment scripts and those used by online groomers, who manipulate children for sexual abuse.

Mia Bloom has zero tolerance for victimization arguments. It is “a fallacious assumption,” she writes, that women who commit terrorist crimes are coerced or manipulated by their men. The first two chapters of her new book on this topic offer detailed case studies of some of the most well-known examples of European and American converts who volunteered for duty on behalf of ISIS, and their sometimes horrific crimes.

Alison Fluke-Ekren, a former Kansas school teacher, started out working with Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and then moved to the Islamic State in Syria, where she led a brigade of women who received military training. She is an unusual example of a woman who has risen to a leadership position within the group. Among other crimes, she forced her 13-year-old daughter to marry an ISIS fighter. Fluke-Ekren was returned to the United States to stand trial and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The daughter, Leyla, was one of the witnesses against Fluke-Ekren. Another is Samantha Lewthwaite, who was married to one of the four suicide bombers responsible for the attacks on the London Underground in 2005, and joined the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab. Lewthwaite is charged with helping to plan the 2013 Westgate shopping Mall attack in Nairobi. Lewthwaite is a fugitive.

Bloom advocates for the repatriation of the women, arguing that they should be tried, punished for their crimes, and then reintegrated into society, just like other terrorist criminals are in Western countries. The roles for women were relatively limited, she writes, and our understanding of their actions has been distorted by ISIS propaganda. And perhaps also distorted by the sensational cases.

Then, the narrative becomes confusing. After outright rejecting the victim narrative, Bloom writes that women who converted to Islam and joined ISIS have a “checkered past” and choose to participate in a search for meaning and purpose. The older women experienced midlife crises. Many share histories of “alcohol, drugs, and sexual abuse” and are “victims of domestic violence.” Bloom portrays them as “vulnerable to charismatic recruiters,” who offer these women a chance to reinvent themselves. Bloom writes that 40–50% of the Western women were converts, a figure I am unable to verify through my research. (It seems too high.) The key point is that starting in 2013, large numbers of Muslim women from across the world, including Europe and the United States, also traveled to join ISIS’s brutal regime.

Bloom offers powerful descriptions of sex crimes committed by the Islamic State against the women, including forced marriages, rapes, and executions when they tried to escape. Many of these women were teenagers when they left their homes and, as such, deserve the leniency typically granted to juvenile offenders, she argues. Women can be radicalized on their own volition, and some may become more extreme in beliefs and actions than men going down the same path, but women may also be victims at the same time that they are victimizers.

Chapter 3 describes Boko Haram’s victimization of girls and teenagers who are kidnapped in raids on villages. The title of the book is fitting in that the women are turned into human bombs under the niqabs they are forced to wear. Still, their agency is reduced to a choice between becoming sex slaves and breeders of the next generation of fighters or doing a suicide mission. Bloom has interesting insights to share from her fieldwork with humanitarian organizations that work with the girls. Still, it is difficult to fit the account with the overarching argument of the book that we should stop regarding women as lacking agency when they join the global jihad.

Bloom’s book has a split personality problem. It is, as the title indicates, about women as threats: aggressors, terrorists, and recruiters. However, more pages are spent on searing descriptions of how women are victimized in warfare, not only by jihadists but also in Bangladesh, Bosnia, Ukraine, and other places where sexual violence has been rampant. The Assad regime’s practice of raping Kurdish women and ISIS’s enslavement of the Yezidis are described as analogous examples of how sexual violence is a deliberate tactic of war and repression. Always even-handed in her treatment of militarized sex crimes, Bloom concludes with a description of brutal sexual violence by Hamas militants against Jewish and Israeli women on October 7, 2023, chiding both the Israeli authorities and supporters of the Palestinian cause for attempting to deny that the crimes took place.

Bloom emphasizes that Islam itself is not the issue; rather, it is the jihadist distortion of Islam. She notes that converts are especially vulnerable to this perversion because they often lack a solid education in Islam and misunderstand its theological stance on violence and civilian treatment in warfare. Moreover, it is not just Muslim extremists who abuse women. While this is true, focusing on the converts’ misinterpretations distracts from the core issue: terrorist groups’ use of women as comfort women, as breeders of the next generation, as tools for psychological warfare against the enemy, and as human smart bombs. It is all about what works. The Islamic State has now returned to operating as a secret terrorist organization, and recruiting women as volunteers and brides is no longer a useful tactic.

Bloom is a leader in the study of the weaponization of sexual violence. She is rightly stressing the complexities of the processes that put women in a double bind of being both victims and, perpetrators of violence. However, she may be too quick to leave faith out of the picture.

In April 2019, a month after the fall of the Islamic State, women detained in the al-Hol camp in northern Syria were captured by a Saudi TV station shouting: “our faith, ideology have been implanted here forever, and America, the Kurds, the infidels, and the Jews will not be able to remove it. This is a belief that has been instilled in our children too, and we will never regret it. We will continue, because the caliphate will return again” (John Saleh, “The Women of ISIS and the Al-Hol Camp,” Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, August 2, 2021). Five years on, the women and their children are still in the camp, and nothing suggests that they have lost their faith.