One February evening, in Baghdad’s Green Zone, I found myself ransacking an Iraqi MP’s wardrobe. She had looked me up and down, considering my skirt suit and heels. “You have to dress modestly,” she said, “to meet the Islamic State women.”
It was 2019, and so far my career had revolved around mostly failed efforts to help stabilise Iraq, including attempts to influence US Iraq policy from Washington thinktanks and convening high-profile Iraqi leaders in various absurd peace processes. I had grown up half-Iraqi in the UK during the invasion of Iraq – and I felt duty-bound to help my motherland.
Eventually, I became a peacebuilding consultant (yes, that’s a real job) and spent most of my time in Baghdad meeting politicians. I would urge them to embrace political inclusion as a means of preventing a resurgence of violent extremism. They would call me a terrorist sympathiser. And we’d do that dance over and over again. But I was growing tired of the lack of progress. So, when the Iraqi government suggested I focus on a new problem – the fate of IS families – I jumped at the chance.
After the military defeat of IS, the fighters had been killed or imprisoned, but their families were stuck in refugee camps. The government was concerned they posed a threat and their communities didn’t want them to come home. Security services floated the idea of a “deradicalisation programme”. Could we interrogate the beliefs of IS women and make sure they were safe to release?
So, the Iraqi MP and I dressed in our most modest clothes and visited a refugee camp to investigate. Camp authorities arranged for us to meet some suspected IS women. We stood for a moment outside the tent, feeling suddenly afraid. What if these women were dangerous?
We walked in, the light straining through the dark plastic ceiling. Four women sat on thin foam mattresses on the floor. They wore colourful headscarves and long dresses, their blackened feet bare, plastic slippers stacked by the back entrance. Scores of children ran in and out, yelling as they played tag.
“IS came to our village and took girls to marry,” said one of the women. “What could we do? We cannot say no.” She gestured towards a teenage girl, who stared at the ground, picking at her cuticles. “This one is 17, they forced her, now she has two children.”
As I looked at her, I felt silly for having been afraid. These women, like most in the Iraqi camps, were unequivocal victims. “We’re not like the foreigners,” the woman continued, “who came from outside to join IS. We had no choice.” My mind turned to the British teenage girls who had travelled to the Islamic State. They were now sitting in camps just across the border in Syria. Could they be considered victims? The thought triggered a deep uneasiness.
As we travelled back to Baghdad, I wondered why I felt such a strong sense of discomfort. I didn’t just feel pity towards the IS women, I felt personally connected to them. That’s when it dawned on me. I’d come close to radicalism myself, and given the right circumstances, I could have ended up an IS bride.
I’ve always been a bleeding-heart empath: that’s why I went into peacebuilding. But as a teenager, that same impulse could have seen me join a terrorist group. I grew up watching my mum sob over mass killings in Bosnia, did my GCSEs as the UK bombed Afghanistan, prepared for my A-levels when we invaded Iraq. Dead Muslim bodies on TV were ubiquitous, and it felt targeted and intentional. One summer, when I was 17, I studied with sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki, a charismatic Yemeni-American preacher who spoke compellingly about Muslims being under siege. I was entranced by him. A few years later, Awlaki joined al-Qaida. He never tried to recruit me, but what if he had? What if he told me I could defend innocent lives, that the terrible things I’d heard about al-Qaida were just western propaganda? I might have believed him.
Instead, I went to university and my capacity for critical thinking grew and matured. I still believed in fighting injustice, I just knew al-Qaida wasn’t the right vehicle to do it. But there was another generation of teenage girls who weren’t as lucky as me. The ones who came of age watching massacres of Syrian civilians on YouTube, who were persuaded that by joining IS they could save lives.
In the weeks after my camp visit, as I read the academic literature on deradicalisation, I kept imagining my teenage self as an IS bride. What would she say to me now? “You want to brainwash your people to make western war criminals feel safer in their beds?”
This imaginary teenage version of myself had an unmatched ability to skewer me. She saw the absurdity of my work in the international aid industry, the daily compromises to my integrity, the types of people I had to suck up to – and she told me the unvarnished truth. She reminded me of how far I’d strayed from my ideals. But in her words I also heard inexperience, youth and naivety, and my heart broke for her. She’d taken the wrong fork in the road, all her well-meaning passion squandered on that catastrophic choice.
As we conversed, a 35-year-old peacebuilding practitioner and an imaginary 15-year-old, we covered rich ground. The dislocation we’d felt as second-generation British Muslims, the struggles we’d had connecting to our parents, the friendships we’d used to fill the resulting void. We argued about religion, politics, international institutions, sexuality, women’s liberation and the roles we wanted to inhabit.
But what surprised me most about those conversations was how much they made me laugh. There’s something hilarious about a person who says things you’d never dare say, who sees you for exactly who you are. She was witty, precocious and unafraid – unbound by the strictures and expectations of educated, middle-class Britain.
That’s when I knew I had a novel. It felt precious, this spark of joy I’d found in what could’ve been the bleakest of subjects, and I resolved to cultivate it. So, I took a standup comedy course. I wrote down everything from my religious youth, my peacebuilding career, my time in Baghdad, and tested it out on my class. Whenever they laughed, I’d take note.
If I was going to write about IS brides, it had to be laugh-out-loud funny, it had to earn its place on a reader’s nightstand. That’s how I would reach the widest audience. The fate of British IS brides is a national debate, but few people have access to the reality of that experience, and there’s so little understanding of its emotional truth. Through an entertaining, plot-driven, page-turner of a novel, I could make it possible for all types of readers to engage.
It was a huge risk. I’d spent my entire career trying to be taken seriously as one of few women working on Middle East policy. I’d done a PhD, gone to Oxford and Harvard, published extremely sober papers and articles, spoken at endless dreary conferences. Now I was writing a novel full of sex jokes. But when the plans for a deradicalisation programme in Iraq collapsed, and the foreign IS brides remained stuck in camps in Syria, and the policy debates grew vitriolic and reductive – I knew I had to take the leap. Nothing else I’d done had made any tangible difference. And who knows, maybe a naughty, funny novel full of relatable characters will be the thing that finally moves the conversation on.
• Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis is published by W&N on 25 February. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
