Filmed atop a tank, her red hair flowing, or walking through a ruined Kurdish village, Helly Luv sings:
Stand up, we are unitedTogether we can survive itDarkness will never take us . . . United, united, we're marching . . .
Born in Iranian Azerbaijan during the war between Saddam's Iraq and Khomeini's Iran, and rushed away to Turkey by her family, Kurdish singer Helly Luv (Helen Abdulla) grew up in Finland. Today she lives in Los Angeles. Yet her "Revolution," echoing Beatles namesake song and Rolling Stones' "The Street Fighting Man," was filmed not in Hollywood or in "sleepy London town," but in a village near Mosul - a few miles away from Kurds battling ISIS.
Courageous female military units have been fighting the Islamic state. 10,000 women constitute a third of the Kurdish army. Also, in Turkey's southeastern mountains bordering Iraq and Syria, Kurdish women's brigades stand against Turkish forces, which in July began yet another bombing campaign against Turkish Kurds.
Marching as oneJustice for usWe won't give up -
sings Helly Luv surrounded by Kurdish female soldiers. They pray for peace, fighting for their lives and calling for help.
Yet Khadiza Sultana from London and Mississippi bride Jaelyn Delshaun Young did not join Kurdish female fighters. Neither did several Russian women: Moscow University philosophy student and Russian convert Varvara Karaulova, hairdresser Maria Pogorelova, agricultural student Miriam Ismailova, and others who escaped from their home. Instead, they and some 550 Western women left their homes not to support courageous brigades of Muslim Kurdish women, but to join ISIS.
The West seems befuddled.
Leaving her parents' home every day in normal attire, Karaulova would arrive to her classes wearing a hijab. Helped by the security forces of six countries, her father brought her back from Turkey to Moscow as she was about to cross into Syria. Similarly, two sisters, 20-year old Zalina and 15-year Zaida Akaev, ran away from their home in Dagestan because their parents did not allow them to wear a hijab. Caught later with explosives and a suicide note, the two were arrested, tried, and imprisoned as potential suicidal bombers.
What could possibly attract these women, whose act of rebellion, disobedience and escape from the family, does not coincide with traditional Muslim values and contradicts the role of women prescribed in radical Islamic society? Maria Giulia Sergio, an infamous Milanese convert known as Fatima, calls for "decapitation of unfaithful in name of Allah." In a message to her father, she urged him "to grab her mother by the hair and bring her to ISIS; mother is not entitled to her own opinion; every woman should prostrate before her husband, granting him absolute obedience," this daughter commands her father.
Some women launch their passage to ISIS driven by a youthful sense of adventure, secrecy, a romantic rebellion against the establishment. Others become indoctrinated by the war Islam wages against "American/European corruption." ISIS recruiters allure young women by marriages and marital bliss.
Meeting their future husbands online, the "ISIS brides" travel to become "jihadi wives." Joining polygamous unions, they must imagine how their sisters (not yet instructed in jihad) and their sweet childhood friends would be treated by their bearded husbands and their fellow fighters. The pamphlet "Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves," published in the ISIS-occupied territory identifies unbelieving women as female slaves and permits raping, selling, buying, giving as presents, and sharing these female slaves. It, for example, legitimizes the owner's sexual intercourse with a virgin, who "hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse."
The female recruits and sympathizers of Islamic State grew up in the imperfect West with several generations of feminists asserting women's rights. Shouldn't they be petrified by the story of American Kayla Mueller, reportedly owned and repeatedly raped by ISIS leader al-Baghdadi? Are they not appalled by the mass rape of Yazidi girls and by the "disappearance" of 290 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Apparently they are not.
Did Western feminism fail these jihadi wives and their female sympathizers? Perhaps it has been too politically correct to tackle Islam and Muslim radicalism.
For example, visible and loudly, Muslims and non-Muslim women have demonstrated for the freedom of Islamic women to wear burqa in public place in France. But there seems to be no public outcry against Muslim states that demand hijabs, limit women's mobility, and punish women any hint of noncompliance. Little support has been given to Saudi Muslim women who flouted the ban on female driving, two of them arrested, their case heard in terrorism court.
A young Muscovite Muslim, Arabic specialist Latifa, shocked by her former schoolmate's escape, attributes a major role in Islamic recruitment to propagandistic "multi-media - hymns, songs, videos." Along with Muslim nashids (family songs), revised to promote extremism, there is "jihadi rap" the product of American and European hiphop. According to Hisham Aidi, the author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture, some of the biggest stars in American and European hiphop scene are Muslim; for the children of immigrants and/or converts, jihadist rap falls in the category of "cool." Professor Anthony Lemieux shows how music has been used as emotional "catalyst" to promote violence, while recruiting, indoctrinating, and training of jihadi fighters. The precious voice of Helly Luv remains lonely. It is time for artists, musicians, and activists to reach their public with emotionally powerful humane message and to
Come together let em know, let em know we're right here. . . United, united, we're marching We won't give up