While the precursor to ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq, found a more proactive role for women, this was done largely as a tactical innovation and to shame wavering male supporters into action. ISIS, in marked contrast, has strongly opposed any such innovation, although it has enlisted women as propagandists and established an all-female morality police—the notorious Raqqa-based al-Khansaa Brigade. You can define the role of mother, wife, recruiter, and even religious enforcer as “active,” if you like, but it’s primarily as a supporter that ISIS women find their calling in the global jihad.

For an organization so elaborately permissive in its use of violence, ISIS has proved obsequiously conformist on the matter of gender, adhering to the strictest conventions of misogyny and male rule—implemented, ironically enough, with the active and enthusiastic collusion of their female supporters. (As the Atlantic’s Kathy Gilsinan nicely put it, “‘jihadi girl power’ often comes at other women’s expense.”) According to a “manifesto” circulated by the al-Khansaa Brigade in January 2015, a woman’s preeminent role is the “divine duty of motherhood.” The document also advised that it is incumbent on women to “remain hidden and veiled.” Addressing the issue of whether it’s permissible for a woman to participate in combat, the document is clear in forbidding any such participation. But it does license the suspension of this norm under exceptional emergency circumstances, where there are not enough men around to protect ISIS-controlled territory from enemy attack, and only then after a religious leader has issued a fatwa validating this desperate measure. ​

Almost everything ISIS has officially published on the role of women since the circulation of the al-Khansaa document reinforces the position set out in its pages. For example, in Issue 11 of ISIS’s flagship magazine Dabiq, published in September 2015, the author of an article titled “A Jihad Without Fighting” insisted that “if the weapon of the men is the assault rifle and the explosive belt, then know that the weapon of the women is good behavior and knowledge.” The ideal woman is “a shepherd in her house and is responsible for her herd.”

At the beginning of July, however, it was widely reported that a woman carried out a suicide attack in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. According to the Telegraph, the woman, who was also cradling her young child, detonated an explosives vest “hidden under her hijab” as she passed Iraqi government soldiers. Apparently both the woman and her child were killed in the ensuing blast, while two soldiers and several civilians were injured. The report observed that ISIS’s “use of female suicide bombers in battle, while not new, is exceedingly rare and demonstrates the group’s desperation.” It also claimed that it wasn’t the first such attack in Mosul, and that in the two weeks preceding it “more than 20 female suicide bombers hiding among civilians are believed to have detonated explosives.” The source for this was an Iraqi Lieutenant General named Sami al-Aridi, who, in an interview on an Iraqi TV station, said: “The [ISIS] women are fighting with their children right beside them.”