Al Qaeda is using the internet to rally Muslim women to their cause.
A long piece in the New York Times profiles a 48 year old Belgium woman named Malika el Aroud.
She uses a French pseudonym, “Oum Obeyda,” and is a prominent internet Jihadist, so to speak.
The Times story quotes her as denying she spreads bomb-making instructions and she says she won’t take up arms, but she sees her job as encouraging Muslim men to go out and kill Westerners and to rally other Muslim women as cheerleaders for Jihad.
“Writing is also a bomb”, says El Aroud, who is well-known to European intelligence agencies for her passionate hatred of their countries and the West.
There has been an increase in suicide bombings by women in Iraq. 18 so far this year compared to 8 all of last year.
But, the Times points out, there are many more Muslim women engaged in helping their Jihadist sons, husbands and fathers in the shadows.
El Aroud is the widow of one of the two men who assassinated the anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shaw Massoud at the specific request of Osama Bin Laden two days before 9/11.
Massoud, a particularly effective leader, had been approached by the pair posing as journalists for a TV interview.
The bomb was hidden in the television camera and they detonated it when the interview began, killing El Aroud’s husband and the other assassin.
Massoud lost his legs and died soon after. .
At the time, Malika el Aroud was hiding in a jihadist camp for women in Jalalabad.
She remarried later, to another Jihadist.
The two of them were living in Switzerland and running Jihadist websites when they were arrested and kicked out of the country.
Their handling by European authorities has been amazingly lenient, or maybe not so amazing, given the flaccid European track record on punishment of terrorists.
Her husband, suspected of various bombing attacks, disappeared months ago.
She says he is “traveling”.
She is living of the taxpayers of the country she hates, generous Brussels welfare keeps her in a three room apartment receiving $1,100 a month.
She spends all day on the Internet encouraging people to die for Islam.
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