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- [00:00]
Narrator
This year's tax changes better not get caught snoozing. Miss one deduction, lose thousands. Not amusing.
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Sarah Adams
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Don't worry, tax filers, if money is tight, get $100 from Jackson Hewitt so you'll sleep better at night.
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Sarah Adams
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Narrator
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Sarah Adams
Details@jacksonhewitt.com welcome to the Watch Floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Today we're going to talk about how Western women and why Western women get recruited into terrorist networks and how the language that they're coerced or naive or victims themselves is not only untrue, it's dangerous. Western women are not recruited because they're weak. They're recruited because terrorists realize something that our government still can't do. Wrap their mind around. Emotion is operational terrain. And women, especially Western women, are masters at this terrain. This is the watch Floor. Let's get into it. Before we talk about ISIS or Al Qaeda or modern recruitment regarding women, we got to make one thing incredibly clear. Women in terrorism is nothing new. Obviously, the most important example of it comes from Russia and Chechnya. The famous one, black widows. They were responsible for some of the most horrific acts of terrorism in Russia in the early 2000s, including obviously the Moscow theater hostage seize and the Beslin school massacre. Now, these women were a combo of things, but the thing that made them most important is a lot of them are widows of fallen fighters. They already had a grievance that the terrorists could explain and that made them deliberately selected. They could attract less suspicion. The fact that women were involved brought in like, mass media attention. And the grievances that they had, right, that they lost their husbands really did play out in certain circles. It added some power to kind of the commentary going on around these terrorist attacks. You know, that's an interesting model. You take open and emotional trauma and then you convert it into operational violence, right? That's a blueprint we see again and again and again. And keep in mind, terrorists are always trying to exploit that same model because of how effective it was. And that brings us to more of the present day female recruitment. Right? ISIS is best known for this. Obviously they didn't invent it, but they really mastered it. They systemized it, they globalized it. Heck, they digitalized it, right? Because a lot of this was online recruitment. They realized these Western women, especially coming out of like Germany, the uk, America, had three distinct advantages. And I want to talk through each of them. The first is being from the west makes them more credible, right, because they're choosing to go and support the jihad and participate in the caliphate. Another is women have such a different level when it comes to freedom of movement because they're less scrutinized, of course, as they travel around. I mean, think of it. When are you in the airport and you're suspicious of women there being terrorists? It's very rare. The last is they really have an emotional resonance if they're doing propaganda or even recruitment. I mean, think about it. If you're listening to a woman who looks like you, sounds like you, maybe even grew up like you, and she's talking through, you know, why ISIS is doing the things they are. Why? It's just in their sense, maybe why it's okay within the Quran, et cetera. Like, that type of personality is persuasive because it gives you an emotional connection to them, and that can be very dangerous. And obviously, it allowed for these Western women to recruit a number of other women who wanted to be in the same role and be a part of this movement with them. These women weren't just wives. They were recruiters and enforcers and indoctrinators and facilitators and attackers. You know, by the height of the caliphate, there were thousands of women a part of isis, and a large number of them were American and European women. They were active participants. And we're talking about it now because it's not like these women have disappeared. A large number of them have actually been held in camps in southeastern Syria. And that's why we have to come to today and today matters. If you didn't see last Sunday, 3,000 of these women got released from custody in Syria. And since then, more and more have been trickling out. So for a long time, everybody forgot about these women. They said, don't worry, they're detained. They're contained in these camps. We have nothing to worry about. And now they're being free. They're gonna come back with a vengeance. This isn't some sort of humanitarian role where they're being released from these prisons, right? They're being broken out. Terrorists are storming these prisons and letting them out. And the goal of these women is to obviously get back in the fight and then to help propel this second generation of terrorism. ISIS has had a massive resurgence in the last couple years. And now with thousands or more and thousands of more fighters in the mix, right, they're only going to be more emboldened and obviously more successful in some of their future efforts. One is they've been training and preparing to do kind of a blitzkrieg style attack in Iraq, like we saw, you know, in Syria in November of 2024. So terrorists have plans, they're being enabled. They're feeling empowered. You know, it's a very concerning time. And, and remember, there are large numbers of these women in camps. So I'm telling you, there's about 12,000 ISIS women and children that might potentially get released in upcoming weeks. I mean, that is a massive number when you think about it. And then when you think they'll grow larger populations of these fighters, we, we need to keep this in mind. I do want to talk through some of the ISIS females so you understand some of these backgrounds, how impactful some of them are. And really, so you understand this threat. But first, you know, this is a heavy topic and we can't be serious all the time. So I want to play a little clip about these ISIS brides before we jump on in. So let's go.
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Narrator
Coming up this season on the Real Housewives of isis.
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Sarah Adams
Only three days till the beheading, and I've got no idea what I'm gonna wear. Abdul seduced me online. He had me at free healthcare. So this is my sixth marriage. I've been widowed five times, six times. I'm so glad I've moved over here. It's everything those guys on the chat rooms told me it would be. And it's full of so many wonderful surprises. Didn't have to do this at burn. Are you ready, girls? Yeah, hang on. I'm recording it for Instagram. Ta da. What do you think? Ahmed surprised me with it yesterday.
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Narrator
Omg.
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Sarah Adams
Hashtag Jihadi Jane. Hashtag destothe the West ISIS emojis. Oh, babes, I love it. You look gorgeous. She looked massive. You're gonna need a lot of center text to kill that one. So that's funny, right? I mean, you have to be able to joke about some of this because if you think too hard about it or stress over it all the time, it can be a really difficult topic. But let's jump into some of these ISIS brides, or ISIS wives as people like to coin them. The first and most famous because she really found a sympathetic press, which is surprising, but not right. Tara's have really taking over influence operations. It's a Shamima Begum, right? This was a British citizen. She went and joined ISIS in 2015. She was only 15 years old. She went willingly. She married an ISIS fighter. You know, she chose to live inside the caliphate and Then she, after the fact, you know, when it wasn't advantageous for her, she tried to sell herself as a victim. I thought I was doing the right thing as a Muslim. I did not want to hurt anyone at the time. Personally, I did not know that it was a death cult. I thought it was an Islamic community.
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Interviewer
Are you saying that you were groomed?
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Sarah Adams
I think yes, I was groomed and taken advantage of and manipulated into coming.
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Interviewer
Yes, I think it was the Times newspaper and a journalist. You gave an interview where you came across as completely unrepentant, very different from the way you're speaking now. You came across as somebody who basically thought you had done the right thing and that ISIS was a good organization to be involved with. You seemed to be extraordinarily immune to the horrors that you'd seen. I mean, you talked about seeing severed heads in bins, and you said that it hadn't phased you. You even made some comments later on in another interview about the Manchester arena bombing, said it was justified, it was tit for tat.
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Sarah Adams
I was just speaking without knowing fully what I was talking about. I want to talk through some of the stuff she did that proves otherwise. First off, she defended ISIS publicly, especially their attacks. She recruited and encouraged other women from the west to come join in this terrorism. And a lot of these women, you know, they weren't just wives, I told you all these other roles they did. But they also were involved in terrorist attacks and harmed and even killed people. And we have to keep that in mind. You know, there was a wife of one of our 2012 Benghazi attackers. She's actually in Germany right now for five years, because a couple years after our attacks, I think around 20, 20, 2014, her and her husband kidnapped or bought a Yazidi woman, and they used her as a sex slave and obviously beat her and did a lot of horrible things to her. Right. It's not just the male terrorists who commit these atrocities. It's the women. But because they look like us and sound like us, it's very difficult for people to wrap their minds around the fact that, hey, the someone like me can be inherently evil. Now, Shamima wasn't like a one off. She was essentially part of a pipeline. And I want to talk about another ISIS terrorist, but this one's an American. So her name is Hoda Muthana. So she was from Alabama and she chose to go and join isis. The funny part is her alias was. Mmm, Jihad. Right, Jihad. So to say you didn't know what you were getting Involved in and you made your name Jihad, you know, is a little laughable. And the U.S. court system basically felt the same way. And they actually ended up ruling. Yeah, you're not a US Citizen, you don't get protections as a US Citizen, you know, and it basically left her within, you know, one of these camps, stateless in Syria.
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Narrator
This is hoda Mutana, a 24 year old American Muslim. She has spent her last four years married to three different Islamic State jihadis in Syria, saying she was brainwashed by the ideology while she was still in the United states with her 18 month old son. Seated on her lap, she tells an ABC reporter she feels regret.
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Sarah Adams
Definitely it's not Islamic at all, but.
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Narrator
US President Donald Trump already saying she won't be welcome home.
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Sarah Adams
But before any of that happened, I want to make it clear, you know, she went, traveled to ISIS territory, but she was actually in a lot more powerful of a position. She ended up joining ISIS's like Western propaganda and she controlled a big piece of like the English narratives going out. Right? So think about it. An American knows how to say things the right way to influence and persuade, you know, other Americans. This is why famously, you know, Osama bin Laden put out this kind of, you know, letter to America and everybody thinks he wrote it. He didn't write that. You know, remember it went viral a couple years ago. Adam Gaddan wrote that he had an American write the letter because he knew an American could write it in a way that would influence and affect Americans. It didn't in real time. But you know, obviously some useful idiots years later were fawning over it and oh my gosh, bin Laden was so right. I just read a letter to America. I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same. I will never.
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Narrator
I.
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Sarah Adams
Please read it. And if you have read it, let me know if you are also going through an existential crisis in this very moment. Because in the last 20 minutes, my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed. No, like some loser fat American just convinced you with some words. We have to really understand what's going on behind some of these propaganda and media efforts. Because sometimes it is an American, you know, controlling the strings. Now some of the things she did right is she openly called for attacks in the United States. She encouraged lone wolf violence, right, against our country and others. And she really pushed hard using her, you know, American identity as credibility. And you know, that is a dangerous thing. It does play well within terrorist circles. Another ISIS bride that doesn't get a lot of attention and it really surprises me. I don't know if like the US government is kind of dampen. Some of the reporting on her is Daniella Green. If you've never heard of her, this was a contractor and she was working as a linguist at the FBI field office in Detroit. So she's got access to classified information, she has a security clearance, she's translating terrorist propaganda and then supporting terrorist operations. Well, at the time she was supporting operations into a famous German terrorist. His name is Dennis Cuspert, but a lot of people know him from. He was a rapper, his rap name Deso Dog.
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Narrator
He is known by ISIS as the German Abu Talha Al Omani, a notorious ISIS fighter and recruiter. A former German rapper who in intense and disturbing videos called for violent jihad and proudly held the severed head of an ISIS victim. What has not been disclosed until now is that an FBI employee with top secret clearance lied to her bosses, secretly traveled to Syria and married Cuspert for a short time, becoming the ISIS bride of the very terrorist she was assigned to investigate. That now former employee is Daniella Greene, her face obscure due to concerns for her safety having violated the public trust and endangered our nation's security. According to federal prosecutors, Greene served just two years in prison and is now free. Green, who was already married, told her supervisor she was making a trip to Germany to visit family. Instead, she flew through Toronto to Istanbul, traveled south to Gaziantep, Turkey, crossed the Syrian border with the help of the terrorist and disappeared there. In ISIS controlled Syria, government prosecutors say Daniela Graham met up with the ISIS terrorists and not only married him, but told him she was employed by the FBI and that the FBI had an open investigation into his activities. Shortly after arriving in Syria, Daniella Greene had a change of heart and within weeks was sending emails back to the United States. I was weak, she wrote in one. I really made a mess of things this time. The following day she wrote, I am gone and I can't come back. I am in Syria. I am in a very harsh environment and I don't know how long I will last here, but it doesn't matter. It's all a little too late. She went on. I will probably go to prison for a long time if I come back, but that is life.
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Sarah Adams
Now. I've talked about Desadag previously because actually Desodag came to Libya in summer of 2012 and he trained with a number of our Benghazi attackers. He ended up leaving and did participate in the attack against US but he is one of the individuals who knew an attack was coming. He also traveled in through the same pipeline to some of the European attackers came in. And it was very interesting. All they did is get visas from Germany to Egypt and it was just, oh, tourism visas, we're going to go visit the pyramids. So they flew into Egypt and then they snuck into Libya, you know, and they trained in Darna, Libya. So you know, he has ties to Libya, which is really interesting. So anyway, she ends up falling in love with him, okay. She then tells him about U.S. plans and U.S. operations against him. And then she pretends she's going on a trip. She flies there and then sneaks in across the border to Syria and literally marries him. Of course she got, you know, a little slap on the wrist after the fact because, you know, FBI shield her a little bit. But this is something we really need to talk about. This isn't someone who is recruited online. This is an insider threat threat. She was working in the US government against these terrorists. And it shows how the terrorists have reach, right? They were able to recruit someone from the inside using just something as simple as a motion. And this is something they constantly are trying to exploit. And you know, we really need to be honest about that because when you think of someone working for the FBI, you think of them as being a part of a trusted state system. And here we had ISIS being fed information from someone within that system. You know, it's very dangerous when you look at the access some of these women have. Now I've spent a lot of time on the ISIS brides, obviously from the western standpoint. I want to shift to one really quick who is not a westerner, but she played a massive role in bringing in a lot of these women, you know, extending especially into like the Syria theater. Her name is Najda Mohammed Mahdi. If you've never heard of her, she was one of the most famous. She is, she's still alive. Female recruiters within isis. She is the mother of Abdullah Maki. If you don't know who that terrorist is, he was the last head of the ISIS military commission in Iraq. In March of 2025, he was actually going to leave Iraq to go visit his mom in Syria. So his mom is being harbored in Syria by their so called president, Abu Muhammad Al Julani. And after she was there for a few months and feeling safe and secure, Maki's like, well, I'm going to go visit my mother. And so he went to leave Iraq to travel into Syria. And before he got out of Iraq, the US Struck him and killed him. If you don't know Maki's background, he actually is one of the operational planners. He was in charge of external operations for ISIS for attacks in the United States. So he was running a number of sleeper cells in the United States for future attacks, including the sleeper cell that Shamsuddin Jaber was in who did the New Orleans attack. Right. On January 1, 2025. Right. Anyone who told you that he was a lone wolf lied to you. And his cell has not been wrapped up. And they will commit a massive attack here if they don't get wrapped up. It's something we have to be really honest about. So back to Maki's mom. Cause very important. So she focused and leaned heavily in on recruiting Western women. And she understood, hey, a good way to do this is we really need to have these online female forms and connection points. You know, women can go and talk to each other, feel safe, you know, be indoctrinated online. Right. Because obviously they can't really easily join in groups with men. So let's just make female only spaces to take advantage of. It's very smart. She then did a lot of direct recruitment. So she went into all hall refugee camp and was recruiting women from there. She focused heavily on pushing children into terrorist pipelines because she really understood, hey, we need to prepare this second generation of ISIS terrorists. We've taken a ton of losses. You know, we need to regenerate that now while we can and while it's under the radar. Another thing she did that nobody talks about, and it's interesting a woman took this role is remember, ISIS lost most of their territory in Syria. And she's one of the key people that kept some of these ISIS networks together because she was like, we need to make sure people don't start turning on each other and start killing each other and start blaming each other. We have to find a way to stop. Stay united. Right? A woman was doing this, and this is an active role in the organization and she's still working for isis and she's perfectly safe being harbored in Syria. And we have to be honest about that as we watch what this new resurgence of ISIS and this new leadership is going to look like with all these releases in Syria. Now, a lot of the women I talked about would maybe make propaganda recruitment. She helped build the next phase of terrorism. But we need to talk about women who also were directly involved in attacks. We cannot ignore them. So I'm going to shift over to Al Qaeda for A minute. And we're going to talk about Samantha Lewthwaite. If you have never heard of her, her attack nickname is the White Widow, and it's because she's the widow of Jermaine Lindsay. If you don't know who that is, that was one of the terrorists from the London 7. Seven, you know, transportation bombings. But she went on. She got very close to Al Shabaab, for example, one of Al Qaeda's affiliates, and she went on and supported a number of Al Qaeda operations in Africa to where the British government says she's involved in all over 400 deaths in Africa. Right. That's a huge number. So some of the attacks we know of are the Westgate attack in Nairobi, 71 people were killed in that event. The Garissa University attack, 148 people were killed in that. And then the Dusa D2 complex, again in Nairobi, 22 people were killed in that. So she's been at large. So for the last 10 years, nobody has really been tracking on what she's doing. Again, I told you, she spent time with Al Shabaab. She was actually harbored in Somalia. Right now she's actually being protected and kept safe and harbored in Yemen by Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, AQAP's branch. So we can't forget these women who were also attackers. Just recently, a few months ago, we saw this as well. We saw a female suicide bomber, you know, in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, and she blew herself up in front of the Frontier Corps, Right? That's a division within the Pakistani military. You know, I've spent a lot of time in the last 18 months talking about the evolution of Al Qaeda's invisible bomb. It's also called the hidden bomb. All it is is just the newest version of the underwear bomb. Well, in the last year, plus, you know, Al Qaeda has been testing the underwear bomb in different articles of clothing, as you can imagine, because it's not gonna be underwear anymore, because people are looking for that. And one of the places they tested it is in female pregnancy bumps, right? The fake bumps you wear to look like you're pregnant when you're not. Well, those aren't for men to wear, and that's a suicide bomb. So we have to be honest. If they're testing them in them, it is for women to use at some point. And that is going to be the evolution in the future because women have less scrutiny. Now, I want to spend just a quick minute to talk through. How are these women being recruited? Like, what are the main levers terrorists pull to do this. So the first stuff is they look for women who have an emotional grievance. Remember these black widows, they lost their husbands, right? So they already, you know, are upset, you know, with whomever impacted their husband. And they say, hey, we get you're mad about something, but why don't you turn that into a purpose? We don't care if the purpose is revenge. We'll help you, you know, fulfill the purpose you need, right? They're giving you an outlet for kind of your anger or like you to get an answer to what's happened. Another is they find these women who really have an identity crisis, right? I don't know where I fit in. I'm not belonging. And they kind of push a little bit of more clarity. Hey, you know, come with us. We'll get you rooted in the faith, you know, we'll get you a part of the mission. We'll give you a role. You know, you'll be valuable, and that is what a lot of people need. Another one is they really make belonging almost feel weaponized. Another is they take motherhood and femininity and they use it as operational tools. And they make these women understand, hey, manipulate this, right? This is like a superpower you have, and this can benefit the jihad, and only you can do this for us. And remember, these women aren't kind of treated then like exceptions. They are treated and respected, like force multipliers in these movements. So these release of thousands of ISIS females from Syria should not be something we ignore. This is a strategic warning, right? More is coming from these women. And we can't treat these female terrorists as victims first and operators second. We'll keep missing the threat if we don't view them exactly for who they are. We want you to observe things. We want you to assess things honestly, but we also want you to think. See these patterns forming before the threat really reconstitutes. You know, this has been the watch floor. Thanks for tuning in.