A young woman who says she lives in the United Kingdom posted last August to a Tumblr page reportedly run by recruiters for the Islamic State group.

“i so badly want to go to raqqah and live under the shariah and live in the land of khilafa but as a young muslimah in the uk it's rly difficult,” she wrote, using another term for the “caliphate” the extremist network also known as ISIS or ISIL claims to have founded. “it hurts my heart to live here. I yearn to be the wife of a mujahid and support him and khilafa all the way.”

Moments later she received the same warm, welcoming and thoughtful response that so many others on the site had received before, reminiscent of a well-trained college campus tour guide.

“I swear by Allāh I completely understand the feeling,” the responder began, piling on empathy for the young woman’s fears of leaving her family at home for an unknown cause abroad. But the responder assured her she would find even more stability and support were she to travel to Syria and help solidify territory the group had claimed proudly, in blood.

“I refused in the west to marry anyone unless he was a mujahid, I wanted someone who fought for Allāhs deen,” the responder wrote. “And it is a beautiful feeling being married to a mujahid.”

The danger of sites such as these has grown incrementally stronger since last summer, as the Islamic State group continues to strengthen its gains in Syria and defy what Western intelligence agencies thought they knew about Islamic extremist networks.

As many as 20,000 foreign fighters have flocked to Syria and Iraq since the Islamic State group first laid siege to the region last summer, according to numbers compiled by the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Of those, as many as 4,000 have come from Europe, 600 from the U.K. alone. Roughly 100 have originated from the U.S. Of the Western migrants, as many as 550 have been women, according to New York-based security firm The Soufan Group.

If the British government and its Western counterparts have any inkling into what actually attracts their young people to an active war zone in Iraq and Syria, it so far hasn’t yielded that publicly. Officials have offered a range of factors: Perhaps disenfranchised Muslim youth feel they can find the stability and acceptance under the Islamic State group that so far has eluded them in their adopted homes, as European countries struggle to shift from monochrome to increased multiculturalism. Others may simply want to participate in the gruesome violence they see constantly splattered across cable news reports. And maybe all believe there is at least some truth to the Islamic State group’s assurances that Western governments have waged war against Islam itself.

The response from the West has been haphazard and largely ineffective. Most recently, headline space has been occupied by still puzzling reports of three healthy, affluent and educated young British women who reportedly traveled to Islamic State group strongholds to support the movement.

Amira Abase, 15, Shamima Begum, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, went missing and were last seen having arrived in Turkey. The British government confirmed last week they had indeed crossed over into Syria, likely with the help of human smugglers. All three were described as “straight-A students” at their highly regarded east London school where they were studying for college entrance examinations. The girls’ families have made emotional pleas for their safe return.

What inspired their journey is yet undetermined, though they will likely become brides of the extremist fighters there.

The Islamic State group now must reinforce a perception it has established a haven where Muslims, including young women, can enjoy the kind of excitement and purity they could not find in their Western homes, and directly contribute to breeding a new generation of believers.

According to propaganda videos, women can marry handsome fighters and raise strong warriors to protect their adopted homeland. Unlike most other Muslim extremist organizations, the Islamic State group has also not ruled out the possibility of women taking up arms themselves.

“The best thing for a women is to be a righteous wife and to raise righteous children,” wrote one recruiter on a propaganda blog, according to a February study from The Soufan Group

“‘This [migration] was never meant for ease but a lesson of patience & hardship to understand what jannah [heaven] was always meant for & see if we’re worthy of it,’” another wrote, according to the report.

Kashmiri demonstrators hold up a flag of the Islamic State group during a demonstration against Israeli military operations in Gaza, in downtown Srinagar, India, on July 18, 2014. Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images

The Reality

The truth these women face upon arrival is nothing short of bleak.

“It’s heartbreaking to me whenever I look at their pictures,” says Karima Bennoune, an Algerian-American professor at the University of California-Davis School of Law who studies the female casualties of Islamic extremist movements.

“Groups like ISIS believe they have a theological right to the bodies of women and girls,” she says. “It’s the most tragic thing you can imagine – I don’t know whether they have an understanding or not.”

Bennoune's book, “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here” documents the untold stories of female involvement – either by temptation or by force – in previous Islamic extremist movements and the consistent tragedies that traditionally befall them, such as forced marriages and sexual enslavement.

The U.N. documented some of the staggeringly gruesome accounts of rape and torture of women under Islamic State group control in a November report. Fighters prey particularly on unmarried women and girls as young as 13, the report states, forcing them to become brides. Captured women and children of enemy groups, such as the Yazidis in Iraq, were sold in public markets as “war booty.”

A large contributor to the potent recruitment’s success, Bennoune observes, is the immediate media attention to these actions of the Islamic State group, further magnified by its unprecedented ability to manipulate social media to glamorize its vicious conquest

One of the most high profile cases involves two Austrian teen girls, Samra Kesinovic, 17, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, who reportedly left a note to their parents saying they planned to fight with the Islamic State group. They now apparently claim they wish to come home, infuriating Islamic State group leadership.

The slick videos and flashy recruitment materials the group produces is much easier to pick up on and document than, say, the efforts of someone like Samira Salih al-Nuaimi. The Mosul-based human rights lawyer and activist was a leading voice against the Islamic State group’s vicious actions against her countrymen, particularly young girls, before she was executed by the extremist network in September.

Peshmerga fighters inspect the remains of a car, bearing the Islamic State group flag, which belonged to ISIS militants after it was targeted by an American air strike in the village of Baqufa, north of Mosul, Iraq, on Aug. 18, 2014. Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

A Halting Response

The response from the West has so far been insufficient, at times seeming slow to recognize the complicated influences that lead young women and young men to gravitate to a life among terrorists.

When asked how the FBI can offset this troubling rise in Islamic State recruitment domestically, former Director Robert Mueller offered a tactical strategy of attacking the group from the top down, similar to the approach in supposed victories against al-Qaida during the last war in Iraq.

“My own view of ISIS is we need to go after the leadership,” he said, while speaking at a breakfast meeting last week organized by the American Bar Association. He referenced U.S. coordination with U.K. and Turkish counterparts, as well as what he considered successes during the last decade in hunting al-Qaida in Iraq, the Islamic State group’s precursor.

“You did not want to be the No. 3 person in al-Qaida in 2007, 2008, because the life expectancy in that particular position was rather short,” he said. “Our success on the ground there was dependent on great intelligence, and focus, through our troops on the ground.”

He later declined to comment on whether military gains abroad would overwhelm the Islamic State group’s ability to recruit inside Western countries.

The quick and tidy victories from intelligence-gathering and military strikes create a partial illusion of success that could slowly erode perceptions of the group’s invincibility. Meanwhile, the grueling, long-term and difficult work at home of addressing radicalization domestically continues.

“It’s bloody difficult to do,” says Robert Milton, a retired commander of the U.K. Metropolitan Police Service at New Scotland Yard. “It’s so much easier to do the hard things, it’s so much easier to have border control.”

“It’s so much harder to deal with the human mind, the psychology of this issue,” he says. “It require a huge amount of resources. It requires communities to trust us, and that’s been a problem in the past.”

Milton, now a consultant, has lectured at colleges in the U.S. that prepare students for law enforcement careers. He emphasizes the importance of finding the root of Islamic extremism in the true intentions of these groups and what they believe they can tangibly achieve. It isn’t difficult to target and kill a leader, but it is extraordinarily difficult to address and offset why a young person believes Islamic State rhetoric that Western forces have declared war on all Muslims.

The British government has employed a program called “Channel.” Instead of necessarily surveilling and arresting potential terror suspects, police spend time identifying young people who may begin to align themselves with extremist causes, then meet with them directly to determine whether they have the potential to develop into actual extremist fighters themselves.

Police had reportedly held such meetings with the three young British women who disappeared into Syria last week under the auspices of the Channel program. Troublingly to Milton, they passed the test.

“They persuaded that person ... that they were fine, that they weren’t going to do anything,” he says. “They hoodwinked these people. That demonstrates to me, you have to have the right level of training and expertise to have the right intervention.”

“We’re halfway down the route,” Milton says.

Last week, the White House assembled domestic experts and international leaders to a first ever summit on Countering Violent Extremism. President Barack Obama challenged his foreign counterparts to develop internal plans for fighting extremism ahead of the next U.N. General Assembly in the fall.