What’s the appropriate punishment for ISIS brides who didn’t commit any violent crimes? Ishita Prasher reviews Nussaibah Younis’ Fundamentally (Penguin Random House, 2025).
Contemporary geopolitical apparatuses, in their engagement with women marked by terrorism, actively produce their identities within coordinates of suspicion, moral ambiguity and discursive instability. Women’s participation in terrorist organizations saw an unprecedented growth after the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014 and its dangerously effective use of ideology and technology. Even after the territorial defeat of the Islamic State, radicalization proliferated through enduring digital and ideological infrastructures, sustaining the urgency of systematic deradicalization efforts as a matter of public policy. Europol’s 2016 EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report asserted that women accounted for 25% of the arrests made on terrorism charges. According to a 2016 report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies, of all the Western recruits of the Islamic State (ISIS) 20% were women, numerically ranging between an estimated 550-2500 in total, with an average age of 22 years.
With the decline of ISIS, international organizations and governments pursued fitful rehabilitation and deradicalization programs for those associated with the terrorist organization in Iraq and Syria. Such deradicalization programs have historically centered on men, while policymakers paid sparse attention to the gender dynamics at play in the process. As the UN Special Rapporteur “on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism,” Fionnuala Ni Aolain noted in 2017, “While there has been extensive policy and media coverage of returning male fighters, little or no concentrated attention has been paid to returning (and potentially radicalized) female combatants from territories overseas…Little consistent thought has been given to the gender dynamics and gender specificity of de-radicalization programs.”
It was through the course of such rehabilitation efforts that Nussaibah Younis was asked to design a program to deradicalize ISIS women. The offer triggered an idea that eventually took the form of her debut novel, Fundamentally: A Novel (Penguin Random House, 2025), a dark comedy about a UN program to deradicalize ISIS brides. An expert on contemporary Iraq, Younis is a graduate in modern history and English with a PhD in international affairs from Durham University. She directed the Future of Iraq Task Force during her tenure as a senior fellow at Atlantic Council in Washington. She has authored multiple policy reports on Iraq, addressing issues ranging from farm shrinkage and escalating climate change to rural-urban migration and intertribal conflict. Given her prolific academic and policy background, Younis’ choice to work in the fiction genre with Fundamentally is as peculiar as significant.
The involvement of women in terrorism constitutes a substantial subfield within English-language academic scholarship on terrorism. A 2024 study on research on women and terrorism notes an exponential increase in academic publications between 2001 and 2021. It recorded 619 publications, compared to 42 publications between 1970 and 2000. Yet this quantitative acceleration in publications co-exists with a persistent marginality of the field within the canonical academic frameworks, policy formulations, and popular discourse. This marginality becomes especially constraining when addressing the already contested categories of rehabilitation and deradicalization. As policy-oriented research recurrently acknowledges, effective deradicalization programs for women require a nuanced understanding of the motivations and expectations of the women joining such extremist groups, alongside a contextualization of their operational roles. Scholars and policymakers have also emphasized the need to examine the role of religion and ideology both in initial participation and later retention. This underscores the necessity of breaking down silos between research, media representation, and policy formulation.
Precisely within this discursive gap, Fundamentally gains its particular significance. While academic and policy formulations often circulate within specialist and sequestered audiences, fiction offers a mode of engagement accessible to a wider audience. Fiction also provides a propitious space to explore the emotionally charged and ethically fraught questions that surround the ISIS brides controversy with a degree of empathy and narrative complexity.
Narrated in an interiorized first person, Fundamentally traces the journey of Dr. Nadia Amin, a lecturer in Criminology at UCL. Her research focuses on potential techniques for the deradicalization of ISIS-affiliated women. This project lands her a job with the newly instituted fictional UN agency, UN Deradicalization Organization (UNDO). These tasks transport her to the terrain she has hitherto theorized— the displacement camps in Iraq where affiliated women were held following the defeat of ISIS. Nadia arrives in Baghdad tucked in a bulletproof UN car, armored with a faith in positive behavioral transformation that imagines psychological intervention as a pathway towards reintegration and rehabilitation. However, the governmental and UN apparatus she encounters is riddled with bureaucratic inertia, inter-agency rivalry, corruption, and ideological contestations insulated from the realities it claims to administer. Nadia soon realizes that deradicalization is a rhetorical placeholder that the UN sustains largely for appearances as “half the UN doesn’t even believe in deradicalization” (24).
The narrative pays scrupulous attention to procedural details: inclusion mandates misaligned with camp realities; self-serving government officials demanding luxury resorts as venues for discussing the futures of women confined to underfunded camps; meetings that implode over semantic disputes; inter-agency rivalries over funding and authority. Fiction here dramatizes dysfunction to foreground the pronounced disconnect between policy rhetoric and lived realities. But it does more.
Fiction exposes how humanitarian governance operates through a narrativized neutrality that frames institutional choices as technical inevitabilities.
Procedural jargon justifies decisions of inaction and abandonment. Cases are declared outside the mandate and responsibility is deferred, “that’s an Iraqi decision” (156), as the author emphasized. The impact of these decisions on the lives of the women in the camps is violent and catastrophic. Forced marriages are recoded as good outcomes. Mothers are separated from their children. Male desire determines whether women are granted non-violent rehabilitation: “You’ve struck deals for other women without forced marriages?” “Sure, for the old, ugly ones. Finally, it pays to be unfuckable” (146). The narrative exposes the constructed nature of this neutrality. It does so by foregrounding instances where alternate decisions produce radically different outcomes. Elaborate feasts are rendered possible for tribal leaders while the women scavenge for leftovers. Funds miraculously materialize for bribes. Repatriation efforts are expedited through privileged circuits for Khadija, a Sorbonne-educated French-Algerian woman disillusioned with ISIS ideology. Her return is facilitated by her possession of configurations of social capital that institutional logic deems legitimate.
Within this architecture of deferral, the camps function as liminal democratic spaces where laws and procedures persist but rights erode. When rehabilitation programs operate within a matrix of selective humanitarianism, opacity, political optics, and administrative deflections, they risk reproducing the hierarchies of belonging that radical ideologies so often exploit.
By refusing to treat these women as rights-bearing citizens, democratic states undermine their commitments to accountability and equal protection, inadvertently feeding conspiracy imaginations of abandonment and alienation. Instances of revocation of citizenship in cases such as that of Shamima Begum illustrate how democracies may choose exclusion over reintegration, rendering belonging contingent upon security imperatives.
For deradicalization to reflect democratic commitments, it would need to operate through consistent legal procedure, community-based integration, and meaningful international cooperation. While the novel does not offer a policy blueprint, it frames deradicalization as a litmus test for democracy itself.
It reveals how states may either deepen inclusion or default to procedural choreographies in their response to extremism.
Fiction sharpens this structural revelation by embedding it within Nadia’s interiority and consciousness. The novel’s most lucid deployment of Nadia’s interiority occurs in her self-identification with Sara, which emerges as its emotional and ethical core. Sara is a British Asian woman who travelled to ISIS-controlled territory as a teenager, persuaded by her friend Jamila. Over the following years, Sara is married multiple times before eventually being confined to a displacement camp, separated from her young daughter. Sara’s story is not disclosed through a singular act of testimony, instead, it is pieced together by Nadia through social media fragments and patient attempts at coaxing information through repeated conversations marked by silences and hostilities. This fractured narrative reveals that Sara’s story is deeply enmeshed with Jamila’s, who was groomed by a Belgian convert, brought to Mosul, married, brutalized, and killed at sixteen in a drone strike. The intertwining trajectories of the two friends establish the particular context within which Sara’s own radicalization takes place— one shaped by trust, proximity, and catastrophic misjudgment. Sara’s story, in turn, triggers Nadia’s memories of her own childhood and encounters with a charismatic cleric Sheikh Anwar al-Awaki, producing the uneasy recognition that Sara’s trajectory could have been her own.
Deradicalization is not imagined as a simple process of ideological realignment. Instead, it is a belated and embodied confrontation with contingency, vulnerability, resistance, and the emotional residue of youthful attachments. Fiction sustains and elaborates this recognition through interior perspective and affective responses that render the abstractions of radicalization and deradicalization experientially apprehensible. To this end, Fundamentally resists the ethical unambiguity demanded by deradicalization discourses as Sara is neither repentant nor ideologically transformed. Sara’s grief and longing for her daughter, taken away by Iraqi relatives after her husband’s death, function as the site through which the text questions the political and humanitarian frameworks that govern which women are deemed worthy of care. Nadia’s colleagues dismiss her concerns about the radicalizing effect of separating a mother from her child by declaring Sara irredeemable and Nadia too emotional. They argue that Sara’s daughter is better off without her. As the narrative progresses, Nadia’s identification with Sara, rooted in mirrored vulnerabilities, affects her judgment. She neglects other women in the camp and the persistence of Sara’s radicalized beliefs. By the end of the novel, this identification collapses in the face of Sara’s rejection of moderation. The novel closes without any explicit resolution or redemption.
The novel is at its strongest in its affective engagement with Nadia’s personal history woven in the narrative through flashbacks and reflection: her conservative upbringing, estrangement from Islam, strained relationship with her mother, the emotional consequences of her failed relationship with Rosy. This interiority is complemented by the fiction’s ability to center nuances that remain largely marginal in official documentation. Younis’ use of humor and wit, while effective in deflating bureaucratic moral posturing, occasionally feels labored and strained. Yet the novel’s fictional form renders its ethical and political terrain accessible, extending its reach beyond academic and policy audiences. Furthermore, the novel’s most ambitious ethical concerns, around punishment, ideological change, and recidivism, first articulated through Nadia’s academic paper and later staged in Baghdad, remain partially developed. However, leaving these questions unresolved may serve as a reminder that women marked by terrorism embody subjectivities whose complexity far exceeds the institutional frameworks meant to manage them.
Ishita Prasher is Assistant Editor at RevDem’s Cross-Regional Dialogue section.
