A National Security Blind Spot (Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Weingarten, Project-Syndicate)

Erin Saltman saw a disturbing trend. For months, the senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue had obsessively tracked the profiles of more than 130 Western women who had joined the Islamic State (ISIS). Saltman and her team noticed that instead of journeying through Turkey to reach ISIS headquarters in Syria, the women were heading straight to Libya. Because women’s roles within ISIS are related mostly to reproduction and consolidating territory, Saltman was able to deduce the reason: “ISIS wasn’t just looking to have combat forces in Libya, but also to build statehood there,” she explained. “We flagged and highlighted that before security forces were aware of it.”

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gender-and-national-security-by-anne-marie-slaughter-and-elizabeth-weingarten-2016-10