Fatiha Mejjat is a citizen of Morocco. She is the widow of Karim Mejjat, suspected of a planning role in attacks Casablanca, in 2003, and in Madrid in 2004. France 24 reported that Mejjat has acknowledged that, in her youth, she liked to wear short skirts, and smoke cigarettes with her female friends. Mejjati became radicalized in 1990, during the Gulf War, and subsequently marriedKarim Mejjat. The pair had two sons. According to the Moroccan World News, Karim Mejjat was the founder of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which it said owed allegiance to Osama bin Laden. It reports that they moved to Afghanistan, when it was ruled by the Taliban. Foreign Policy magazine reports they moved to Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. Her husband Karim is reported to have gone toSaudi Arabia, in 2003, where he served as an al Qaeda agent. However, he is also alleged to have planned the 2003 Casablanca bombings, in May 2003. Fatiha and one of her sons were detained by Morocco for several months in Morocco in 2003. Her husband Karim was also reported to have played a planning role in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. In 2005 he was living in Saudi Arabia again, with one of the pair's sons, when they were killed during a gunfight with Saudi security forces in April, 2005. France 24 interviewed Fatiha, and published a profile of her, after she published a warning to France that it should be concerned it would be attacked by jihadists. In that interview she denied that she had any ties with al Qaeda, and clarified she did not know of any specific plans to attack France, rather, her warning was based on the perception that, since France sat out the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it had been turning against the Muslim world. Her surviving son, Ilyas, went to work for ISIL's media arm. After moving to the territory controlled by ISIL she came to lead the al-Khansaa brigade, an all-woman unit charged with enforcing the ISIL interpretation of female modesty, proper female attire. Jeune Afrique reported that she married a senior ISIL leader, in 2014.
