ANTAKYA, Turkey — Hala, 22, cuts a diminutive figure in her loose black abaya, a black headscarf framing her large, almond-shaped, pale blue eyes and fair skin. Eight months ago, before she married, the young Syrian woman didn’t even cover her hair. Now, she’s a combatant for Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, although most of her battles are with patriarchal commanders who try to keep her from the front. Women fighters are rare in Syrian rebel ranks, with the exception of Kurds, who — like their Iraqi Kurdish counterparts — have all-women units. The few women working with Jabhat al-Nusra are mainly involved in intelligence gathering, according to several senior Nusra commanders in Syria’s Idlib province — which makes Hala a rarity. Syria’s battlefield features a complex mix of rebel groups from across the Islamist political spectrum, as well as those outside it, all competing for control and influence. And then there are the radical transnational groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, which remains Syria-focused, and the more virulent organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which has declared a swath of Syria and Iraq as its new caliphate and renamed itself the Islamic State (IS). The ultraconservative male-dominated domain of groups like IS and Jabhat al-Nusra is a harsh milieu in which a woman’s demand to be deployed as a suicide bomber is framed as a religious-based demand for gender equality. Such experiences also offer a glimpse into the evolving daily normalcy of the reality being created on the ground by these movements. Hala is one type of Al-Qaeda woman, Sara is another. A 29-year-old with impeccable cheekbones, perfect teeth and a cascade of waist-length brown hair she twirls into a bun, Sara is one step removed from the front. She is from an Al-Qaeda family. Her husband, brothers and brothers-in-law are all armed members of Jabhat al-Nusra. One of her brothers is one of nine senior emirs, or commanders, in Idlib province. Her eldest brother, Rashid, was a member of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which became Al-Qaeda in Iraq. He is presumed dead, killed in the battle of Fallujah against U.S. troops in 2004, although his family doesn’t know for certain. The two women don’t know each other, although they were once based in the same small village in northwestern Idlib province. Before the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, Hala had been at university, studying trade and economy in Latakia, the provincial capital of a predominantly Alawite stretch of Syria. “I used to dress casually, wear makeup, tight clothes, come and go with my friends,” Hala told me. “I didn't have an awareness or understanding of religion.” I met her and her husband in April, during a temporary stay in their friend’s apartment in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, close to the Syrian border.

I used to dress casually, wear makeup, tight clothes, come and go with my friends. I didn't have an awareness or understanding of religion. Hala Woman in Jabhat al-Nusra

Hala says that her views were not changed by a particular person or incident, but that they developed in tandem with a revolution that began with peaceful protests and morphed into an armed insurgency with an increasingly Islamist hue. “Once it became a jihad and there were mujahedeen, the philosophies of our religion were in front of us,” she says. “It awakened me to Islam.” Hers was more than simply a religious awakening, however. Her condition for marrying her husband was that he help her secure a combat role alongside him. He agreed, and they both initially joined a Salafi fighting group independent of Al-Qaeda — but left it within a month. “They wouldn't let me fight,” Hala says. “They said I should sit at home. I said, ‘Is there anything in Islam that says I should sit at home?’ I hate this ignorance. Convince me through my religion and I will accept it.” Instead her commander’s concerns were more parochial: “He said, ‘They'll say, what? He doesn't have men?’” The next morning the couple pledged allegiance to Jabhat al-Nusra. Though she wasn’t interviewed, she says her husband was asked two questions by the Nusra emir who accepted them: "Is she brave enough?" and "Does she have the strength?" He said yes to both. “They replied, ‘We welcome her and her jihad.’” Nusra’s Al-Qaeda affiliation was an attraction rather than a detraction for Hala. “It bothers the West, which pleases me,” she says. “Let them say Qaeda is terrorist. It honors me to be called a terrorist.” She shows me a photo, on her phone, of herself in full military camouflage, pants and a long kameez with a matching ammunition belt. Her face is covered with a balaclava, and a Kalashnikov hangs off her shoulder. She admits, though, that she saw little action and that most of her duty was holding the line on fronts that had already been won, which frustrated her. Her presence among ultraconservative men was a logistical problem. She did not stay in Nusra bases but was housed nearby. A request to join her husband on a mission to the Sheikh Najjar neighborhood of Aleppo was denied because, she says, the Nusra base there consisted of two rooms and about 40 men. “If I went, I'd be in one room with my husband and the other 39 men would have to be in one room. That's not fair. So they didn’t let me go. I understood.” She volunteered to undertake a suicide mission against a checkpoint in the regime-held city of Jisr al-Shughour in Idlib, but her commanders denied her request. She hadn’t memorized the Quran, they told her, a condition Hala thinks was just an excuse. “They just didn’t want me to do it. The Syrian mujahedeen choke, they’re pained when they see a female fighting. It affects them deeply. The foreign fighters don’t.”

Anti-Assad protesters hold the Jabhat al-Nusra flag during a demonstration in Idlib province. Hussein Malla / AP Hala and her husband now want to join Nusra’s rival, the newly rebranded Islamic State. The group was disavowed by Al-Qaeda in February, after an uprising against ISIL by a number of Syrian rebel units. Nusra had initially tried to cut an uneasy middle path between ISIL and the Syrian rebels, and offered sanctuary to foreign fighters who had borne the brunt of the anti-ISIL backlash because they tended to be more conservative and strict with locals than Syrians. At the time, Nusra asked Hala and her husband to share their home in Syria with a Tunisian ISIL emir and his wife, something they willingly did. Nusra later became openly hostile to ISIL, and the Tunisian emir fled to Raqqa city in the northeast, the only one of Syria's 14 provincial capitals to fall from the government's hands. It’s the de facto capital of a self-proclaimed Islamic state. IS has publicly demanded that Al-Qaeda accept the authority of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (now referred to as Caliph Ibrahim), a request Nusra and Al-Qaeda have rejected. Hala’s husband wants to join IS because he thinks Al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has gone soft and has wronged al-Baghdadi. Hala wants to join because she has seen women fighting in its ranks, although they were all foreigners rather than Syrian. What makes her desire for combat and martyrdom even more startling is the fact that she was 10 weeks pregnant at the time of our meeting. Hala’s pregnancy, however, was not the reason she and her husband were in Turkey. They were there because the internecine war between Nusra and ISIL had heated up, and they intended to travel to Raqqa city via Turkey to join the Tunisian emir who had been their guest. “If God grants us martyrdom, the child will be raised either by my parents or my husband's,” Hala said matter-of-factly. Her parents and siblings, now in Saudi Arabia, can’t understand her transformation. “They can't convince me [to stop], but they use emotion — you know how parents are — but I refuse. I say, ‘We'll meet in paradise.’” Unlike Hala, Sara isn’t new to Al-Qaeda’s ideas, but she is new to having to do the laundry by hand because there’s no electricity, and to living in a two-story home whose first floor is often inhabited by the families of foreign fighters temporarily housed there by her brothers. When I first met her in early February, a German ISIL fighter, his wife, several children and two other German women whose husbands had been killed in battle had recently vacated the first floor. The women barely spoke any Arabic, Sara said, but she was happy for the female company. “There's nothing here,” she said, gesturing outside the window at the homes around her. “The thing that makes me happiest now is to see my brothers after they come back from an operation. I'm the first to see them, to cook for them, wash their clothes, and the same for my husband. This is enough for me now. There is no need to think about another life.”

The thing that makes me happiest now is to see my brothers after they come back from an operation. I'm the first to see them, to cook for them, wash their clothes, and the same for my husband. Sara Woman in a Jabhat al-Nusra family