Invisible Martyrs

Farhana Qazi draws on her background as a pioneering counterterrorism professional and a devout Muslim to offer an insider’s view of what drives girls and women to join radical Islamic movements, and identifies what America and the world community can do to keep them from making this terrible choice.

Why would a girl from Denver join ISIS, a radical movement known for its mistreatment of women? Why would a teenage Iraqi girl strap on a suicide bomb and detonate it? Farhana Qazi, the first Muslim woman to work for the U.S. government’s Counterterrorism Center, has been fascinated, even obsessed, by this phenomena for over a decade and has circled the globe searching for answers. What she has found are women, sometimes confused, sometimes taken advantage of, and sometimes as radical and dedicated as their male counterparts, women whose stories she tells. Here is the book that reframes the story so readers can see the female terrorists as they are– ordinary women co-opted by radical men, other extremist women, or motivated by their own experience of oppression. The untold story of the women of these movements is important to understand and recognize if the world hopes to contain the expansion of these ever present threats.