The high-profile spouses of ISIS killers frequently have surprising backgrounds from bikini-wearing sun worshipers to guitar-toting band members.

The widow of one of the Islamic fanatics responsible for last week’s terror rampage in Paris comes across as prim, even drab, as she goes through passport control at the airport here ISTANBUL—On the CCTV footage released by Turkish police.

Hayat Boumeddiene’s tightly drawn headscarf that is white hooded coat is a cultural world out of the scanty bikini she was wearing in an image that showed her on a beach fondly clutching future assassin Amedy Coulibaly. The break snap was taken before 2009, when she started to cover herself up with scarves and veils.

The transfer is startling from sun-worshipper and eager holidaymaker into the buttoned-up moll of an Islamic assassin.

The 26-year-old looks giddily in love cuddling Coulibaly—a display of public affection hardly consistent with the puritanical strictures of Salafi jihadis.

Her now-dead partner also used to pursue a lifestyle that clashed with the teachings of Islamic militants. Neither were paragons of religious rectitude. French police arrested Coulibaly on a string of theft and drug offenses before he embarked in the path of jihad and finished up gunning down four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week. In the caliphate of the Islamic that is self-styled State where, in accordance with Turkish authorities, Boumeddiene has found sanctuary and also to whom Coulibaly apparently aligned himself, theft and drug use incur far worse punishments compared to those meted out because of the unenlightened West—including flogging, amputation, and execution.

But then Boumeddiene and Coulibaly aren’t unique in having exited rowdy lifestyles that are alternative at variance with Islamic puritanism, embracing instead the simplicity of jihad. Although Coulibaly, it seems, observed the conservative demands a little lower than his consort. During a 2010 interview with police investigators, Boumeddienne admitted Coulibaly “wasn’t really religious” and liked to “have fun.”

Some Westerners do indeed appear to have been devout before traveling to Syria or aligning themselves with jihadis—although how knowledgeable the ones that are really young the obviously disturbed are about their religion remains questionable. Some of the frantic devotion has the ring of hollow religiosity, ritual without content, more cult-like than whatever else.

Even so, Melanie Smith, a researcher with the International Centre for the research of Radicalization, has argued that numerous of the estimated 200 or so Western girls and women that have gone to Syria to join the militants “tend to be extremely pious and have been IS fan-girls through the duration of the Syrian conflict.”

Aqsa Mahmood, a 20-year-old who was simply raised in a Glasgow that is well-heeled suburb attended a special Scottish girls’ school, fits into that profile. She led an life that is orderly a teenager—wasn’t involved with boys, drugs or petty crimes. She seemed normal in many ways until she was lured and groomed online. And, relating to her parents, she became more “concerned and upset” by reports for the Syrian conflict. “Aqsa, like many young adults within our community, was naturally angry and frustrated in the lack of innocent life at the center East,” the parents said at a press conference last summer after their daughter ran off to Syria to be a bride that is jihadi.

Other recruits to your jihadist cause, though, appear to have had a more that is“secular path, swapping whatever they see because the rootlessness and chaos of the lives when it comes to false clarity and fake simplicity provided by al Qaeda or perhaps the Islamic State (also well regarded as ISIS).

That are more the real reason for the recruitment of Britain’s Sally Jones—an much more unlikely Salafi candidate than the bikini-wearing Boumeddiene. Jones was 45 years old when recruited and wasn’t even born into a Muslim or a minority family that is immigrant.

Now calling herself Sakinah Hussain or Umm Hussain al-Britani, Jones, a mom-of-two from the rural county of Kent in southeast England, sneaked into Syria in late 2013 after an romance that is online Junaid Hussain, a young hacker-turned-militant from the English city of Birmingham. She is considered to be residing in the city of Raqqa, the de capital that is facto northern Syria of the Islamic State. In online exchanges with potential Western recruits, she claims to be experiencing the strict Sharia law associated with the caliphate, from whence she tweets blood-chilling threats.

Her most micro-missive that is vicious within the wake associated with the mass decapitations of 50 Syrian soldiers, for which she declared: “You Christians all need beheading with a fantastic blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa. Come here I’ll get it done for you personally!” She posts photos of herself posing with an assault that is AK-47 and dressed up in black niqab, which takes care of all of the face and the body except the eyes. She and Hussain—he’s 25 years her junior—are now married.

But back when you look at the 1990s she was an associate of a smalltime girl punk rock band called Krunch and was then wielding a guitar instead of an rifle that is automatic.

She was in and away from relationships and jobs that are dead-end. One online video shows her wearing a low-cut top and leather mini-skirt that is tight. Neighbors within the town of Chatham have described her to British tabloids as a “nightmare”—an aggressive, anarchic woman who dabbled in witchcraft and drugs and threatened to put spells on them.

A purposeless, ungrounded life stands apart with Boumeddiene, too. Born within the Paris suburb of Villiers-sur-Marne, she was raised in a rundown part of the town. Her mother was devout and died when Hayat was 6. Her most beautiful asian woman father was unable to cope after his wife’s death and Hayat plus some of her six siblings needed to be taken into foster care. Her father visited her rarely and then seems to have broken with her after remarrying, although recently they have been thought to have reconciled. In care, she had to frequently be moved between foster homes because she proved troublesome and violent. She met Coulibaly in Juvisy-sur-Orge, southeast of Paris, while being employed as a cashier, a job she later lost as a result of her insistence on wearing the niqab.

One neighbor told French media that Coulibaly was the force that is driving their partnership: “She left here with that man. He did everything and then it all came down on her behalf. He had been the mastermind.”

Maybe so, perhaps not. The masterminds that are real to be their jihadi mentors, who knew how exactly to channel the purposelessness and direct the anger. Of her religion, she told detectives this season, “It’s something that calms me down. I’ve had a life that is difficult this religion has answered all my questions.”

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