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“So there are very sophisticated marketing strategies, on social media and so on, to appeal to women and girls or to men and boys,” she explained. It’s “very deliberate.”

There is also a specific “ISIS manifesto” for women which apparently governs what happens once a girl or women enters the organization. “Primarily it’s about supporting the Jihadi or the ISIS fighter as the wife. You know, helping to keep the cause going through giving birth to the next generation, building the caliphate, building the society,” she said.

Photo by AP Photo/Felipe Dana

Women also become involved in education within the organization and in recruiting other women and girls, especially online. There is evidence to suggest some women are involved in the fundraising arm of the operation, while recent reports suggest increasing openness to women’s participation in more violent roles.

Sometimes they escape. “You have the narrative of women who have been in ISIS, where they talk about the brutality of ISIS, or they talk about the harshness of the conditions of living with ISIS in Syria or Iraq,” Febbraro said.

“You can basically build a counter-argument. ISIS promises this idyllic world for women, but the reality is much different. So you can start to raise challenges about the ideal life, the message that ISIS is trying to sell. You get that from those real, first-person accounts.”

Privacy concerns make Western governments leery of interfering on social media, Febbraro said, but there is growing recognition that they “can’t just sort of sit back and let the extremist groups dominate social media.”