As the United States and Europe have slowly come to terms with the grim reality of the Islamist terror threat, comment and analysis on how to deal with it have almost invariably concentrated on angry young males. What has frequently been overlooked is the role played by females on the peripheries of many terror plots in the West. Their involvement has ranged from encouraging their jihadi relatives, ensuring that their will to carry out the operation remains strong until the end, to withholding information from the authorities. Although the West has yet to see its first female suicide bomber, recent developments suggest that such an incident is likely, perhaps even inevitable....
(Concludes)Women have for some time been used by jihadi groups as highly effective weapons and it comes as no surprise that this year has seen reports of a heightened interest in that threat from a number of national security services. Women are just as susceptible to the jihadist ideology as men and their role in the west as facilitators and enablers of jihad could evolve, as it already has in other parts of the world, to a more direct and violent one.
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