In July 2014, she left Morocco for Syria and joined ISIS. She appeared in a few online videos and tweeted that she was planning a suicide attack. Then she disappeared. I heard that she had married an ISIS commander and that Ilyas had gone to work for the group’s media division.
I met the other woman, Malika el-Aroud, in Brussels in 2008. At the time, she was a prominent Internet jihadist, encouraging men to fight and women to support them. I called her and asked if we could speak about her life and her role as a woman in the world of jihad.
During that first phone conversation she took notes. When I’d finished speaking, she asked for my name again. “You may call me back in two days,” she said.
On that second call, her voice was much friendlier. “Salam, sister,” she said warmly. “I spoke to the brothers from the Rafidain Center, and they said it’s okay, I can talk to you.”
I had no idea what she meant by the Rafidain Center. I thought it might be her mosque. I said I wanted to talk to her, but also to visit some of the places where she spent time. “Maybe we could go to the Rafidain Center,” I suggested.
There was a long pause. “What?” she asked. She explained that she was talking about the people who translated Osama bin Laden’s speeches online and that no one knew where they were.
Malika was born in northern Morocco but grew up in Belgium. As a child, she had rebelled against her religion. She married for the first time at eighteen, split up with her husband, and gave birth to a child on her own.
At a time when she was desperate and poor an imam helped her. She couldn’t read Arabic, but she read the Koran in French and was drawn to a strict version of Islam. As she moved into more radical circles, she met and married a Tunisian fighter loyal to Osama bin Laden named Abdessater Dahmane.
From the beginning, Malika’s religious fervor was mixed with a feeling of secular outrage. She felt the whole world was against Muslims. In 2001, like Fatiha, she moved with her husband to Afghanistan, where he trained in an Al Qaeda camp, and she lived in Jalalabad, in a compound with other foreign women.
Malika said the Taliban were a model Islamic government. Her only rebellion was against wearing the burka, the restrictive garment they forced on women, which she called “a plastic bag.” As a foreigner, she was allowed to wear a long black veil instead. “Women didn’t have problems under the Taliban,” she told me. “They had security.”
Her husband was one of two assassins ordered by bin Laden to kill the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001, two days before the attacks on New York and Washington. Posing as Arab TV journalists who had come to interview the famed resistance leader, the men carried a camera packed with explosives. Dahmane survived the attack but was shot while trying to flee.
Malika was briefly detained by Massoud’s followers. Frightened, she convinced Belgian authorities to arrange for her safe passage home after the United States began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001.
Back in Belgium, Malika was one of nearly two dozen defendants tried for complicity in the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud. Wearing a black veil, she testified that she had been doing humanitarian work and was unaware of her husband’s activities. In the end, there was not sufficient evidence to convict her.
Meanwhile, she rose in stature as the widow of a martyr. She told her story to a journalist who helped write her memoir, and she gained a reputation for urging others to jihad via the Internet. Online, she met Moez Garsallaoui, a Tunisian several years younger who had political refugee status in Switzerland. They married and moved to a small Swiss village, where they ran several pro–Al Qaeda websites and Internet forums that were monitored by Swiss authorities as part of the country’s first Internet-related criminal case.
Swiss police raided their home and arrested them at dawn in April 2005. A source of mine who headed up the Special Forces unit said that her husband had rushed to the computer to delete incriminating material and that he’d begun trembling when they arrested him. Malika, meanwhile, was absolutely cool. Wearing pajamas, she demanded to be allowed to put on her hijab and cover her face. “She’s quite a strong character,” my source told me.
Malika later said that the Swiss police beat and blindfolded her husband and manhandled her while she was sleeping unveiled. Convicted in 2008 of promoting violence and supporting a criminal organization, she received a six-month suspended sentence.
Her husband, who was convicted of more serious charges, was released after just twenty-three days in prison. The Swiss authorities suspected he was recruiting to carry out attacks and that he had connections to terrorist groups operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan. By 2014, the authorities said that they had lost track of him after he was released from jail, and Malika wouldn’t tell them where he was, saying only, “He is on a trip.” Malika was eventually sentenced to an eight-year prison term in Belgium.
Now, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, there was another woman of North African descent who was the widow of a “martyr” in a major international operation. I was now working on contract for the Post, and my colleague Michael Birnbaum and I began to dig into the life of twenty-six-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene. We visited the places where she or her family members had lived, and spoke to her relatives and friends. I also noted that French investigators had found a copy of Malika’s memoir among the belongings in her apartment.
Along with our French stringer Cléophée Demoustier, Michael and I visited Villiers-sur-Marne, where Boumeddiene had grown up with her parents and siblings.
Most of the buildings there looked as if they’d needed maintenance ten years ago but had been abandoned. Graffiti covered the walls, and I heard children cursing each other in a mixture of Arabic and French as they stood around watching videos on their smartphones.
I had been to these suburbs several times before and was familiar with the contrast between the glamorous Paris portrayed in romantic Hollywood movies and the lives of the people in these buildings. Residents complained of racism, saying that when they applied for jobs, the combination of an Arabic-sounding name and their address would often make employers choose someone else. Some even told me they were considering changing their names to sound more French.