British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed his "deep" concern on Saturday after three British schoolgirls travelled to Turkey in a suspected bid to join ISIS.
The three girls, aged 15 to 16, flew from London to Istanbul on Tuesday. They are believed to be planning to cross the border into Syria.
Cameron said Saturday that the teenagers' disappearance was "deeply concerning." He added that the fight against what he called an "appalling death cult" requires help beyond that provided by police and border control.
"It needs every school, every university, every college, every community to recognize they have a role to play," he said.
British police said that hundreds of citizens have left the country to join extremists in Syria. Officials say they are growing increasingly alarmed about a trend of girls and young women who have expressed an interest in ISIS.
In the case of the three girls, Cameron said that their families were caught off guard by their desire to join the extremist group.
"These three families had no idea of the intentions of their daughters – no idea whatsoever they were going to be travelling to Turkey, and that they intended to go to Syria," he said.
The family of one of those girls, 15-year-old Shamima Begum, is begging for her to return home.
"We understand that you have strong feelings and want to help those you believe are suffering in Syria … (but) please don't cross the border," they said in a statement.
All three girls attended the same school in London, and were straight-A students. All three girls were interviewed by police in December, when another classmate left home to join ISIS. Investigators did not believe they showed any risk of becoming radicalized.
But British police say that Begum ended up reaching out to a well-known ISIS recruiter on Twitter.
Peter Ahearn, a former FBI profiler, says that this campaign to lure young women and girls is a new development.
"The question is why they're going: whether they're actually going to start and share in the fighting over there, or are they going over there to be almost sort of a mail-order bride," he told CTV’s Katie Simpson.
One Canadian woman has already joined ISIS on the frontlines.
She is known as "Toronto Jane," and her movements have been tracked through her Twitter account across Syria and Iraq.
But it is rare for women to be deployed in this role, and counter-terrorism expert Mubin Shaikh says women are more likely to be used in other capacities.
"It's to populate the Islamic State, and as they see it, it's their duty to give birth to the next generation of the caliphate," he said.
Amanda Rogers, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has done research on ISIS, says that the group has two different types of propaganda.
One type is targeted at the West – typified by the beheading videos that have been released by the media – and the other, is aimed at young Muslims.
The propaganda invites potential recruits to be "residents" of the new Islamic State, rather than as mujahedeen, Rogers said in an interview with CTV News Channel.
"They're a call for young Muslims to come and join the process of building a state ... a homeland," she added.
And Rogers says that ending this type of propaganda could be difficult. She says simply shutting down or censoring messages related to ISIS will only empower the group.
"Then you feed into the underlying foundational narrative of the group, which is to call out hypocritical political stances in the West, and to reinforce the narrative that there is not the free space for Muslim speech," she said.
With a report from CTV's Katie Simpson
