Why is it so difficult to prosecute female terrorists?

For decades, terrorist organisations have targeted women for recruitment. Deployed as suicide bombers for Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Tamil Tigers, and Hamas – to name but a few – women have also died serving in frontline roles. Yet we are now faced with a new group of female terrorists that are proving difficult to prosecute. These are the women who joined Isis and now want to return home, often with their children in tow.

New pictures of Shamima Begum, released this week, serve to underscore this point. Begum’s story captivated the British public when she left the UK with her two friends to join Islamic State in 2015, aged 15. After the collapse of Isis, she was discovered in a refugee camp in northern Syria in 2019. Her subsequent interview with the Times created a national furore, when she declared that seeing a severed head in the bin ‘didn’t faze her at all’.