Tel Aviv Notes Subject: No. 88
October 9, 2003

Female Suicide Bombers for God
Yoram Schweitzer Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies

The suicide bomber who struck Maxim's Restaurant in Haifa on October,
killing 19 people and wounding dozens of others, was a 29-year-old lawyer
sent by the fundamentalist terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. She
was also a woman. Does the use of a female terrorist bomber constitute a
turning point in the policy of fundamentalist terrorist organizations?

Before this attack, six other women were sent by "secular" organizations to
blow themselves up in Israeli cities and more than twice as many had
volunteered for suicide missions but were caught before they could act.
Female suicide bombers have also been active in the ranks of terrorist
organizations elsewhere in the world since the mid-1980s. The first was a
17-year-old Lebanese girl named Sana Mehaydali, known to her admirers as
"The Bride of the South." In 1985, she was dispatched by the PPS, a
secular, pro-Syrian Lebanese organization, to blow herself up near some
vehicles carrying Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.

This paved the way for several other Lebanese women acting on behalf of
other secular terrorist organizations. From Lebanon, the use of female
suicide bombers spread to other countries and within a few years was adopted
by ethnic-national movements like the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the
Kurdish P.K.K. Women of the "Black Tigers" unit of the Tamil Tigers have
accounted for about a third of the 240 suicide bombings in Sri Lanka, while
P.K.K. women have carried out about two thirds of that organization's
suicide bombings. And in the last year, women have played a central role in
the Chechen campaign of suicide bombings directed against Russians in Grozny
and Moscow. In fact, women have been responsible for about half of the
suicide bombings, and in the international media they are referred to by the
symbolic name "black widows." It should be noted that the Chechen terrorist
organizations act in the name of an ethnic-national ideology but are thought
to be cooperating with global jihad organizations connected to al-Qaeda, and
among their commanders are alumni of Afghanistan. It may actually turn out
to be the case that the growth in the number of Chechen female suicide
bombers signals the beginning of a change in the position of fundamentalist
Islamic organizations with respect to the involvement of women in suicide
attacks.

Until recently, the use of female suicide bombers was a clear indicator of
secular terrorism, but the distinction between "secular" and "religious," in
this respect, has become increasingly blurred. The willingness of
fundamentalist Islamic organizations to make use of women in their suicide
operations contradicts the principles of religion as well as traditional
social norms that preclude the involvement of women in "masculine"
activities that require close contact with men to whom they are not married.
These contradictions have been fiercely debated by religious figures
authorized to grant legal approval of the suicide operations carried out by
religious terrorist organizations. But in choosing between the competing
claims of religious strictures and practical needs, religious authorities
who support suicide attacks, such as Sheikh Qardawi and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin,
have predictably found an appropriate legal justification that permits the
involvement of women.

The willingness of fundamentalist terrorist organizations to use women
despite the dilemma posed by religion and tradition stems from their
understanding of the tactical advantages conferred by their seemingly
innocent outward appearance and the universal perception of their
non-violent character. These enable them more easily to bypass security
measures and personnel less suspicious of their intentions. These
considerations must overcome the inhibitions grounded in the norms regarding
the status of women in the traditional societies in which they operate as
well as concerns about possibly opening a Pandora's Box of demands by women
for rights and freedoms currently denied them.

The selection of candidates for suicide operations and the methods used to
persuade them are generally similar to those employed for males. An
examination of the global phenomenon of suicide bombers across a range of
countries and national-cultural contexts, in both secular and religious
organizations, reveals few differences with respect to gender.
Organizational leaders and handlers, who take advantage of their innocence,
enthusiasm, loss of focus, and often their personal distress and thirst for
revenge, expose women as well as men to intense indoctrination and
manipulation. The "persuaders" offer a course and sense of direction that
many have lost due to personal circumstances, as well as seemingly magic
solutions to their problems, infused with national or religious symbols and
promises to them and their families of concrete rewards in this world and,
quite frequently, in the next world, as well.

This first "successful" suicide attack by woman acting for a fundamentalist
Palestinian organization -- there were previous attempts but they were
intercepted or aborted - constitutes a further erosion of the restraints
those organizations place on themselves. It is therefore likely that this
will not be last time that fundamentalist organizations use a female suicide
bomber in Israel or elsewhere. Nevertheless, women are not likely to take
on a dominant role in the terror campaign. Hamas, in contrast to Islamic
Jihad, has always given greater weight to practical considerations and been
less punctilious about the ideological content of its actions. Even so, it
has hitherto limited women to supporting roles in suicide bombings, such as
the attack on Sbarro Restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001. Still, the spiritual
leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, has not excluded a direct role for women and
has even provided an appropriate a priori legal justification.

It is also possible that al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups, whose leaders
have thus far refrained from involving women in their operations except in a
support role, will change course in the future. A hint of this may be seen
in the recent capture of two young girls in Morocco on their way to a
suicide attack. The "religious-ideological" distance that al-Qaeda will
have to travel in order to involve women in suicide bombings apparently
constitutes a difficult challenge for it. Still, if tactical-operational
considerations require that and the promised result seems worthwhile in
their eyes, they may well cross that Rubicon, too, and then find some
retroactive religious justification. In short, there is a real prospect
that fundamentalist terrorists will begin to imitate their secular
counterparts and make much greater use of female suicide bombers in the
future.

______________________________________________________________

Published by TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies
& The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
through the generosity of Sari and Israel Roizman, Philadelphia
http://www.tau.ac.il./jcss/