Woman claims hundreds of Muslim women in Antwerp “pledged allegiance to ISIS”
A Muslim woman dressed in a niqab. (JULIEN WARNAND/AFP/Getty Images)
In a new book released in Belgium on Thursday, a young Muslim
woman who had been radicalized, claims there are hundreds of women in
Antwerp alone who support the Islamic State and have pledged allegiance
to its leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. The revelations come just two weeks
after Belgian authorities announced they had arrested four ISIS-linked teenagers who were allegedly plotting terror attacks on crowded places in the city, which is Belgium’s second largest.
In the book, My Deliverance from Evil, which she wrote under the pseudonym of Intisar Umm Mansur, the 23-year-old mother of two describes her three-year-long radicalization process, which brought her to the brink of leaving for Syria and ended with a sudden wake-up call after the November attacks in Paris. Growing up in an open-minded Moroccan family in Antwerp, her parents never forced her to wear a headdress — but she did anyway, to show her support for the Palestinian cause. It was Belgium’s headscarf ban which started her radicalization process. “It felt like my identity had been taken away from me,” she told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. “I don’t understand that people see the headscarf as a form of oppression. That ban caused more harm than good. Without it, I would have finished school and gotten a diploma. I wouldn’t have kept myself away from the world, and maybe I wouldn’t have been radicalized.”
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In the book, My Deliverance from Evil, which she wrote under the pseudonym of Intisar Umm Mansur, the 23-year-old mother of two describes her three-year-long radicalization process, which brought her to the brink of leaving for Syria and ended with a sudden wake-up call after the November attacks in Paris. Growing up in an open-minded Moroccan family in Antwerp, her parents never forced her to wear a headdress — but she did anyway, to show her support for the Palestinian cause. It was Belgium’s headscarf ban which started her radicalization process. “It felt like my identity had been taken away from me,” she told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. “I don’t understand that people see the headscarf as a form of oppression. That ban caused more harm than good. Without it, I would have finished school and gotten a diploma. I wouldn’t have kept myself away from the world, and maybe I wouldn’t have been radicalized.”
CLICK TO READ MORE
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