In February, a 26-year old Malaysian doctor going by the name “Shams” made the decision to leave her family and home to join the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as what she called a hijrah (“holy pilgrimage”) to commit jihad in Syria.
Posting social media updates on her experiences travelling to Syria and during her stay there, Shams has now become a phenomenon on viral news site Buzzzfeed.
Through multiple social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and ask.fm, Shams related her experience of travelling from Malaysia to Turkey, before making her way into war-torn Syria (without the knowledge of her family). On her Tumblr blog, Diary of a Muhajirah, Shams signs off as “Bird of Jannah” (Bird of Heaven).
Two months after her arrival in Syria, Shams agreed to be married to a Moroccan jihadist in an arranged marriage, and despite language issues and the obvious hardships inherent in living in a warzone, the newlyweds found themselves in love.
Shams’ online fame likely stems from the sheer volume of updates she posts and the fluency of her English, and the intimate details she adds to the usually one-dimensional media portrayal of an Islamist militant fighting in the Middle East.
She peppers her descriptions of daily life in Syria with spiritual poetry, romantic anecdotes about her married life, and the types of photos overlaid with inspirational and religious quotes one would often find on Instagram. Last month, she intimated to her online following that she was pregnant with her first child.
She even posted a grim “selfie” of sorts:
Of course, Shams also uses her social media savvy to defend ISIS’s cause and to decry the attempts to silence her – her Facebook accounts are routinely shut down, as Facebook’s standards “don’t permit terrorist groups to use [the] site”. Her Twitter account has also since been deleted.
Online reaction to Shams’s social media presence has been mixed, but most comments have skewed towards lambasting Buzzfeed for romanticising an ISIS jihadist’s life and giving it undue attention; others lament what they perceive to be the Stockholm Syndrome-like symptoms of a Muslim woman locked in an ideology she has limited understanding of.
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