Enveloped in her black, all-covering burqa, Farishta Jami emerged through her front door, peering out at the searing green of an English spring. Fifteen years after she was sent from Afghanistan to marry a man she had never met, she’d found the will to no longer be a prisoner of her violent husband. Each morning, the mother-of-four would leave her apartment in a quiet suburb of Stratford-upon-Avon and go to work serving lunch to children at a local school. Few seemed aware of the new arrival in their community: “I noticed her,” one local woman remembered, “but not many others did.”
Late at night, Farishta would travel to another faraway world. Later, police would discover thousands of videos on the Islamic State propaganda channels she ran on Telegram, showing how to operate automatic weapons and manufacture homemade explosive devices. There were videos of children staging suicide bombings and a disabled man in a wheelchair strapping on an explosive vest.
Tamora, the vengeful Goth queen in the bleak tragedy Titus Andronicus, was imagined into being by the young William Shakespeare at his home, within walking distance from Farishta’s apartment. The queen vowed:
“I’ll find a day to massacre them all.
And raze their faction and their family.”
Farishta was convicted in February on charges of preparing to join the Islamic State in Afghanistan together with her children.
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The Islamic State’s resurrection
Later this week, European leaders are scheduled to discuss how to continue operating the last remnants of what was once the Islamic State’s sprawling caliphate: The prison camps of Al-Hawl and Al-Roj, which hold some 55,000 prisoners, mainly women and children. President Donald Trump’s administration has terminated funding for the camps, and fears are being voiced that the Kurdish militia, who run the camps and prisons, will no longer be able to secure them. Thousands of Islamic State cadres are already reported to have escaped.
Evidence that the Islamic State is seeking to resurrect itself isn’t hard to come by. Researchers Mona Thakkar and Riccardo Valle, in a granular account of Islamic State fundraising, have shown how prisoners at Al-Hawl and Al-Roj are using cryptocurrency to sustain the core of their organisation.
Through 2024, the organisation also succeeded in mounting a series of lethal operations across the world. Four ethnic-Tajik terrorists succeeded in killing 145 people at the Crocus Theatre in Moscow. Likely inspired—at least in part—by Islamic State propaganda, former United States Army officer Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed fourteen in New Orleans. There were attacks on a church in Turkey and a mausoleum in Iran.
Security services around the world also interdicted large numbers of attempted attacks: The attempt to bomb a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna; planned strikes on Olympic events in Paris using jihadists from Iraq and Syria; a network operating out of Côte d’Ivoire and Madagascar that was seeking to route attackers to Europe.
Even greater evil has played out in regions of the world where the Islamic State has secured some degree of territorial control. Earlier this month, 70 Christians were found beheaded in a church in Lubero, in the war-torn North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The violence in Congo is being carried out by the Allied Democratic Forces, a militia that has allied itself with the Islamic State’s Central African wing. Local Islamic state militia have said that Christians must either convert or pay religious taxes, or jizya.
To the north, Islamic State wings control significant swathes of territory. It has, for example, ruled northern Mali’s Menaka region and parts of its Gao region since 2023. For their part, Jihadist groups control over half of Burkina Faso. Islamist insurgents have increasingly choked the lines of communication to significant cities and have spread operations into coastal countries, Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire.
There is, simply, no precedent in history for a terrorist organisation that has been able to maintain such a tempo of violence across such an enormous geographical space. What is it, then, that has allowed the organisation to set down roots from underdeveloped corners of the Sahara to the most sophisticated capitals of Europe?
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Flailing states
Farishta’s story isn’t exceptional: Across Europe, there have been dozens of incidents where immigrants have been involved in plotting violence against communities where they sought haven. In France last month, a 37-year-old Algerian killed a 69-year-old man and injured five police officers while shouting religious slogans. A Turkish teenager was arrested in Austria days earlier for plotting to bomb Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, using pipe bombs he had learned to make on the internet. Farhad Noori, an Afghan immigrant, ploughed his car into shoppers in Munich.
Even though Europe’s Right wing argues these attacks are driven by the cultural and religious values of immigrants, the truth is more complex. The scholars Jean-Victor Alipour and Joop Age Harm Adema, after a thorough review of the statistical evidence, have concluded that immigrants to Germany do not disproportionately commit violent crimes. An earlier study by Rita Maghularia and Silke Uebelmesser came to similar conclusions.
The more useful question to ask is why some, like Farishta, are drawn to the Islamic State. Too little is known of her story, like those of most Islamic State-affiliated individuals in the West, to draw useful conclusions. The young mother’s life in a brutal country, the trauma of domestic violence and the desire for empowerment may all have had a role. Like many other jihadists, though, Farishta seems to have been deeply alienated from her social milieu, lonely, and vulnerable to recruitment to a cause that seemed to give her life the simulacrum of meaning.
Large numbers of studies of English jihadists, similarly, have shown that anger against racism, guilt over past sexual or social behaviour and the search for power and agency all contributed to the lure of Islamism. In online groups, jihadist recruits find a sense of community absent in their real-world life. The ghettoisation of immigrant groups also severs young immigrants from the wider community, much like Farishta. In this sense, the members of jihadist groups aren’t dissimilar to recruits to criminal street gangs or, for that matter, Hindu-nationalist vigilante groups.
These sentiments, strangely, wouldn’t be unfamiliar to jihadist recruits in Africa. In Mali and in Mozambique’s Cabo de Delgado, Caleb Weiss writes that the Islamic State offers recruits extensive opportunities to participate in Dawah or proselytisation. This gives recruits the opportunity to gain social status and agency, both of which young people lack in underdeveloped societies. They also give young men a chance to exercise power over the community, particularly women.
Failure by nation-states to implement policies that include and empower vulnerable young people, then, lies at the heart of why organisations like the Islamic State are succeeding. In Afghanistan or Somalia, there is no nation-state to intervene in the lives of young people. In Europe, the failure is less conscionable.
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Limits to force
Located on the edge of collapse, many nation-states are seeking to stamp out the Islamic State threat by unleashing massive counter-violence. The countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, which saw anti-Western juntas installed in coups after 2021, have recruited Russian mercenaries and set up local militia to fight the threat. The consequence has been indiscriminate violence, which has deepened the resentments that have fuelled the Islamic State’s growth.
Europe and the wider West, for their part, lack any coherent strategy to encourage the assimilation of migrant groups. Long decades after immigrants first arrived in Western countries, many communities remain economically and educationally marginalised. This does not always manifest itself in terrorism. Sweden, for example, faces a crippling problem of ethnicity-based gang violence. Yet, the underlying social fracture creates a ready pool of recruits from which radical movements like the Islamic State can draw.
For years now, experts have underlined the need to build viable nation-states out of the ruins of countries like Syria and Iraq, and to mirror counter-terrorism efforts in Africa with the sustained construction of state capacity.
The collapse of the Afghan republic in 2021 graphically demonstrated that coercion alone would not be adequate to defeat terrorism and insurgencies. An official United States investigation revealed that the billions of dollars spent in aid on Afghanistan went into ill-designed and wasteful projects that enriched local elites and Western companies but did little for the country’s people. An audit of programmes meant for immigrants in Europe would likely reveal much the same.
As Trump’s slashing of budgets for aid to countries like Syria shows, however, the lessons haven’t been learned. The Islamic State is just cashing in on the failure of the world’s powers to deal with the problem.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)