Umm Adam: The Architect Behind the Islamic State’s Matchmaking Network
Umm Adam: The Architect Behind the Islamic State’s Matchmaking Network
Fatiha Mohamed Taher Housni al-Mejjati (a.k.a. Umm Adam), is a member of the Islamic State’s media committee and therefore one of the most powerful women in the organization (The Africa Channel, January 15). Wearing black from head to toe with a strong, bulky physique and deep, sonorous voice, she is single-handedly shaping a new form of terrorist female militancy by skillfully manipulating both gender restrictions and roles to carve out a new role of female power within the ranks of jihadist male militants. In her public discourse, Fatiha is a master of the art of manipulative rhetoric, alternating between a language of victimization and of tyranny. With language awash with references to her as a victim who has been subjected to all kinds of injustice by the authorities, Fatiha knows how to win sympathy and support from her male listeners. It is this uniquely manipulative rhetoric and oratory that makes her an important female militant in the Islamic State organizational structure.
Background
Aged about 55, Fatiha was the first wife of Karim Thami al-Mejjati, a Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group militant with allegiance to Osama bin Laden. She grew up in a popular area of Casablanca, in a family who practiced moderate Islam. In an extensive interview for the French television production “La Veuve Noire,” Fatiha spoke of how she would wear short skirts and high heels as a young woman (YouTube, October 10, 2009).
Her path to radicalization started after the Gulf War erupted in 1990, when she was a law student in Paris (Morocco World News, July 10, 2014). Fatiha was greatly affected by what she considered to be an unjust war; she began to question everything and went through an identity crisis. Feeling disillusioned and let down by the West, she became radicalized at the age of 30. She returned to Morocco and got a job as an assistant manager at a management school (MEMRI, September 14, 2005). A few months later, she asked if she could come to work wearing a hijab, and when the school refused her permission, she quit. In response, some of the school’s students began a petition to support her; one of these was the 24-year-old French-Moroccan Karim al-Mejjati, a secular educated graduate of a French high school who married Fatiha in September 1991 (YouTube, October 10, 2009).
After accompanying Fatiha to a jihadist conference in Paris, Fatiha persuaded Karim to follow the path of jihad, and in 1992, just a year after they were married, Karim left to fight in Bosnia as a soldier of al-Qaeda. Fatiha justified her husband’s acts as a response to the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia, which was the catalyst for him leaving everything and beginning his international missions and ascension into the ranks of the jihadist group (MEMRI, September 9, 2005).
Continuous Jihad
In 2001, Fatiha, Karim and their two children relocated to Afghanistan, where Karim was to become an explosives expert. For Fatiha, one of her sweetest memories was being bought her first Afghan chador—a cloth wrap worn around the head and upper body by Muslim women—which she described as “C’était le plus beau jour de ma vie” (the most beautiful day of my life) (Maghress, May 30, 2005). After Afghanistan, Karim took Fatiha and the children to Pakistan, with the goal of meeting Osama bin Laden, before settling in Saudi Arabia as a midlevel field operative for al-Qaeda. On March 23, 2003, Fatiha and her son Ilyas were visiting an eye clinic there when they were arrested, incarcerated and interrogated about her husband’s terrorist activities solely in relation to the United States (The National, March 23, 2010). She said they subjected to torture, including sleep deprivation. They were transferred to Morocco for interrogation on June 20, 2003, and were held there until March 2004. However, the Moroccan government denies that Ilyas and his mother were ever detained (Maghress, June 3, 2005; Justice Morocco, May 31, 2012).
Her husband, Karim, was killed together with their 11-year-old son, Adam, by Saudi authorities in a series of raids in April 2005, for his alleged involvement in the Riyadh compound bombings and the 2003 Casablanca bombings, as well as masterminding the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 London bombings (Morocco World News, July 10, 2014).
Sometime after Karim’s death, Fatiha Islamically married a man she never met—the Moroccan detainee Omar al-Omrani Hadi. Hadi is a Salafist-Jihadist activist who was sentenced by the Moroccan government to 14 years in Tiffelt prison on terrorism charges. The Moroccan government neither acknowledged her marriage to Hadi, nor granted her permission to visit him in prison, on the grounds that they did not have a civil marriage contract (Najdland). This resulted in her leading a series of protests in front of the prison demanding his release (Maghress, July 11, 2014).
Human Rights Activism in Morocco
In October 2010, Fatiha founded the Committee of Truth in Morocco to defend the freedom of opinion and expression of faith (Maghress, January 1, 2013). Through her activism, Fatiha advocated for the rights of detainees, denouncing the sudden disappearances, torture and ongoing human rights violations in Morocco’s Temara secret detention center. However, the Morocan government repeatedly denied the existence of the facility (Arab Times Blogs, April 2011). She claims to have worked on several cases of former detainees who were tortured in Temara, most of whom are said to not want to talk about it after their release due to the taboo and shame associated with their imprisonment (YouTube, May 27, 2011).
Fatiha also claims that the facility is a secret American proxy run by the Moroccan government, and that she and her son, Ilyas, who was 10 at the time, were held in compulsory detention in Temara for nine months (YouTube, May 27, 2011). She claims that she and her son were subjected to emotional and psychological torture, which left her son traumatized and resulted in a permanent psychological condition and a hormonal disorder that caused extreme obesity. In 2010, she brought a case against the Moroccan government for the unlawful detention of her son in 2003, claiming that detention had left him mentally damaged (Foreign Policy, April 9, 2010).
For a woman who despises democracy and Western values, advocating for human rights and freedom of expression is a somewhat stark contrast. However, her allegiance to al-Qaeda and its anti-Western stance shaped her views that the secret detention of some Islamists is done to serve the CIA and to help import American-style democracy to the Muslim world (YouTube, October 10, 2009). Also, through human rights advocacy, Fatiha has again found a way to manipulate others and draw support to her cause, especially those desperate for political change in Morocco. Her human rights activism was at its peak in 2011-2012, which coincided with the Arab Spring that was sweeping through the Middle East and North Africa.
With the Arab Spring, Fatiha seized the opportunity to be heard on a wider public platform. An example of this is her filmed speech in support of the 20th February Movement, which led the protests in the streets of Morocco from February 20, 2011 through the spring of 2012. [1] She spoke on behalf of those in Moroccon prisons, whom she referred to as “detainees” rather than “Islamist detainees,” intentionally aiming to engage with the freedom protesters who related to her cause on the basis of human rights rather than Islamist support. Throughout the speech, she altered her language to relate to the Freedom Movement, stating that “we want a free Morocoo, in which we can live with dignity and freedom.” She then called on the protestors to support her cause, as they share the same beliefs and ethos, adding that “the regime builds barriers between us [i.e. the Islamists and the freedom protestors] by calling me a terrorist, but I am part of you and you are part of us, and we will support you until we liberate Morocco” (YouTube, April 22, 2011).
The Road to Syria
Fatiha announced her allegiance to Islamic State leader and self-declared caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after her arrival in Raqqa, Syria on July 5, 2014; in an image posted to her Twitter account, Fatiha posed in front of the court in Jarabulus, a small Islamic State-controlled town near Syria’s border with Turkey. Her arrival abroad put an end to the Moroccan government’s concerns about her insidious influence in Morocco; the government had placed her under constant surveillance by secret police officers in Casablanca because she encouraged youth to perform jihad in Syria and Iraq, wage jihad against the United States, and pledge allegiance to the Islamic State, which Fatiha views as the fulfilment of the “promise of Allah” to Muslims (Maghress, July 11, 2014). She went to Syria to marry al Baghdadi’s aid, and her son Ilyas acted as a middleman between his mother and the jihadist suitor (Jeune Afrique, November 24, 2014). It is reported that her suitor’s job within the Islamic State is to replace Haji Bakr within al-Baghdadi’s entourage.
The Islamic State’s media arm subsequently led an online-media campaign on Twitter and Facebook called the “Nafir (call to arms) of our mother, Umm Adam, to the Islamic State,” celebrating Fatiha’s arrival to the Islamic State. Fatiha is now the trainer of Islamic State women, the “mother of believers” (al-Arabiya, July 10, 2014; Le Parisien, June 15, 2014).
Manipulative Tactics
Fatiha’s manipulation tactics are part of her strategy to access a wider audience for her jihadist cause, and to be accepted and heard especially by men. Her black full-body covering facilitates this access as if, by choosing to be totally covered from top to toe—even wearing black gloves and thick spectacles—Fatiha has divorced herself from her femininity, and so cannot be judged on it. She does not want to be seen as a woman, as this could discredit her ideological influence, especially among Islamist men. She wants to be seen as an intelligent voice and active Islamist militant equal or even superior to her male peers. However, Fatiha’s manipulation centers on rhetoric, which she shapes according to the situation, choosing when she wants to be seen as a woman who deserves sympathy, and when not.
This strategy is explicit during her May 2011 videoed speech, in which she testifies about the existence of Temara prison. In the video, Fatiha manipulates the emotion of her attendees and viewers by toning down her voice and beginning to cry when she talks about her detention in Temara with her son. Toward the end of her speech, she raises her voice in an authoritative tone when she denounces the Moroccan government (YouTube, May 27, 2011). In another video, titled “A state against a woman,” Fatiha calls on the Moroccan government to execute her, allow her to relocate to another country or else grant her the freedom to remarry and work like other citizens. She cries during her video appeal and then raises her voice in an authoritative tone to explain that the problem the government has with her is that she wants Shari’a in Morocco, again employing her tactics of manipulation to gain support for her cause (YouTube, August 5, 2012). It is this manipulative strategy that has made her an appealing militant for the Islamic State, a woman who can draw a lot of support and sympathy to the group’s cause.
Fatiha is in control of her emotions, never expressing yearning or sadness unless it is to manipulate others for the sake of the jihadist cause. There were occasions when Fatiha publicly expressed her emotions, but these were exercises in crowd manipulation. Fatiha has openly expressed her sexuality by opposing the court decision to not let her remarry because she lacked evidence of a civil divorce from the Morocan detainee Omar al-Omrani Hadi, to whom she claims to have been married (YouTube, August 5, 2012). Still, she views emotional expression as vulnerability, which she protects herself from with her black covering and emotional detachment.
Women and Jihad
Fatiha is vocal about her sexual urges, with terms like “marriage” dominating her discourse and expressing her right to get married after her claimed divorce from Hadi. Previously married to two men, and still expressing her urges for a new marriage, Fatiha is very sexualized and passionate in her quest for male company and love. These stated sexual urges can be easily redirected to another male jihadist after widowhood and divorce. Contrary to the traditionalist Islamic narrative, which is discreet about sexual urges, Fatiha represents a breakthrough—a new frontier of female jihadists who are very explicit in expressing their sexuality. Challenging the conventional norms of what is expected to be heard of a fully covered Muslim woman in a burqa, Fatiha’s jihadist activism affords her the freedom to express her sexuality under a structured religious legitimacy.
By empowering someone like Fatiha and giving her a role as a leading female militant in the organization, the Islamic State is establishing a new role for female jihadist militants, different to that of jihadist women who are viewed as a means of reproduction to guarantee the survival of the organization. Unlike Fatiha, these romanticized jihadist women, such as the Malaysian militant Shams (a.k.a. Umm al-Baraa), do not reach the higher ranks of the organization or attain leadership roles. [2]
Another unusual aspect of Fatiha’s role within the Islamic State is her effort to control the more vulnerable and weaker female militants through her involvement in matchmaking. For example, Ahlam al-Nasr’s marriage to Abu Usama al-Ghareeb was facilitated by Fatiha; al-Nasr is one of the Islamic State’s foremost poets and al-Ghareeb is a propagandist, making the pair the Islamic State’s media power couple. [3] This allows her to cement her position as a key player in the jihadist organization’s couple dynamics. Fatiha’s operational authority over the al-Khansaa brigade, the Islamic State’s female special militant brigade, through which she recruits women in Raqqa in Syria, represents another level of the dynamic of her hunting for vulnerable women.
Conclusion
Fatiha symbolizes a new dimension of the Islamic State’s female militancy, one that transcends the traditional Islamic female roles of “breeding machines” or sexual objects into a new definition of female power and mastery of extremist rhetoric. At present, the female jihadists’ role is to offer their bodies as a sacrifice, which the Islamic State can then present to the male jihadists, and on the other end, the male jihadists offer their bodies to the jihadist cause through fighting and dying for their belief. While both genders of jihadists are under the impression of being equal players within the organization, they are both being manipulated by the Islamic State. Fatiha perfectly fits within the Islamic State’s reinvented manipulative dimension of female militancy, where women within the organization can still serve the continuity of the organization by reproduction, but at the same time be emotionally detached from the male jihadists in order to accept the fact that he will inevitably be killed or imprisoned. In short, they can define themselves by their roles as widows rather than wives. As a result, female militants can gradually develop a relationship of dependence not with their husbands, but with the jihadist cause, which will provide them with a new husband after they are inevitably widowed, just as Fatiha has done.
Halla Diyab is the founder and director of Liberty Media Productions, which focuses on cross-cultural issues between Britain and the Middle East, and a columnist at al-Arabiya English, writing on Syria, Islam and Middle East political affairs.
Notes
1. The movement demanded political reform, and for a new constitution to be implemented to bring democracy to Morocco.
2. Shams documents her sentiments towards her new jihadist husband on a Tumblr called Diary of a Muhajirah at https://diary-of-a-muhajirah.tumblr.com/.
3. For more on Ahlam al-Nasr, please see “Ahlam al-Nasr: Islamic State’s Jihadist Poetess,” Militant Leadership Monitor, June 2015, https://mlm.jamestown.org/single/article_id=44108&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=539&cHash=157055bb7b66cf1ddfcf60df344edf42.
