Beyond the Jihadi Bride: Women in ISIS and Their Roles During the Organisation's Peak Period

This study reviews 90 English-language sources to examine why women joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and what roles they assumed once inside the group. The review centers on the organisation's peak years of 2014 and 2015, when ISIS held its widest territorial control and women's involvement was most visible. The analysis focuses on that peak period, but it draws on scholarship retrieved through institutional databases and published through early 2026. Across that literature, women appear to have entered ISIS through several pathways, including ideological commitment, coercion, intimate ties, economic pressure, and a search for belonging. After joining, women occupied a wider range of positions than the wife-and-mother frame implies, including recruitment, propaganda, enforcement, education, and health care. The article argues that these functions placed women closer to the organisation's core operations than early media narratives usually allowed. It concludes by calling for more regionally grounded and methodologically rigorous research on women in extremist organisations.