She looked like many of the other young women on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road. Seeing her in the shopping district with her rucksack and pretty face, you might have thought she was on her way to meet a boyfriend, or to buy some long-coveted item of clothing. The woman's name was Wafa Idris. She wasn't shopping, or meeting a boyfriend. Her rucksack contained a 10kg bomb, and she was about to sacrifice herself on the altar of Palestinian freedom. When the bomb exploded in January last year, it killed Idris and an 81-year-old man. Around 100 others were injured. On Idris's behalf, a group called the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade claimed responsibility for the atrocity.
Sept. 11 had an electrifying effect on the Palestinian intifada, but there were plenty of other rallying points for those inclined. And Idris was very much inclined. Before she died last year, she worked in field hospitals with the Palestinian Red Crescent in Ramallah. The horrors stayed with her. She herself had twice been hit by Israeli plastic bullets.
There were other reasons why 28-year-old Idris might have wanted to take revenge on Israel. Politically active, her family were driven out of Ramallah by the Israelis. They fled to one of the squalid refugee camps on the West Bank. Idris's three brothers became members of Fatah, the Palestinian faction associated with President Yasser Arafat. One, Khalil, was imprisoned by the Israelis for a decade. Idris's father died when she was a child. There had been other cause for sadness, too. After marriage, Idris had a late miscarriage. The doctors said she could have no more children. Her husband's response was to divorce her and marry again.
Her sister-in-law, Wissam Idris, said Wafa was often angry and used to sit by herself in her room for hours. None of these reasons alone is enough to explain why she blew herself up. But for whatever reason, Idris gave herself to Allah and the Palestinian cause. The bomb in her rucksack was made with a highly volatile explosive packed into pipes. Triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, is made by mixing acetone with phosphate, and leaving it out in trays to dry. It is then ground to powder. In a grotesque parody of the domestic female stereotype, it is usually ground in a food mixer, before being fed into metal tubes.
The Arab press glorified Idris. One Egyptian newspaper compared her to the Mona Lisa, registering her "dreamy eyes and the mysterious smile on her lips." Others cited Joan of Arc, or the Virgin Mary. In the months immediately after Idris's death, more and more female suicide bombers appeared on the West Bank. One, a 21-year-old English-literature student named Darin Aisheh, detonated explosives in her car at a military checkpoint in February, wounding three policemen. Andaleeb Takafka, 20, killed herself and six others, and injured 104 people in April, using explosive tied to her waist. Ayat Akhras, 18, blew herself up outside a Jerusalem bus stop a month earlier.
The M.O. changes
The trend represents a change in the profile of suicide bombers, says Michael Tierney, a journalist who has studied female terrorists in the Al-Aqsa teen brigade. "Previously, the suicide bomber fitted a stereotype: male, unmarried, immature, under-educated, aged between 17 and 23, and fanatically religious. Today, the martyr has evolved: he has become a she."
Why, in particular, do we find it strange that a woman might cherish death?
"No one likes to think of women as bloodthirsty," explains Kate Coleman, biographer of the US militant eco-activist Judi Bari.
"Also, we think of women as being pro-life, so suicide bombers go against all our mythologizing about females. But women have launched wars and run bloody campaigns in the past, Bari said.
To understand, perhaps one needs to think about the structure of society, rather than focusing on a bomber's personal circumstances. Meir Litvak, from Tel Aviv University, is keen to put the actions of the individual into the wider context of Muslim fundamentalism.
"It is difficult for people who were taught that life is a supreme value to understand a society or a culture that promotes death as something to be cherished," Litvak said.
In fact, the phenomenon of the female terrorist is not exclusively Islamic. Leila Khaled, a Palestinian who hijacked an aeroplane in 1969, became a cultural icon -- but so did Ulrike Meinhof, whose Red Army Faction wreaked havoc in Germany during the following decade. There are women in the IRA and in ETA. In Norway, there's the Valkyria, an all-female terrorist group.
Two recent Indian films, Dil Se (From the Heart) and The Terrorist, feature female suicide bombers as their leads; and many other women have hit headlines around the world through their bloody self-sacrifice. In 1985, a 16-year-old girl drove a car full of explosives into an Israeli checkpoint in Lebanon, killing two soldiers. She was thought to be one of a squad of around 400 women suicide bombers trained in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. A female Tamil Tiger killed the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. And between 1995 and 1999, 11 women conducted suicide bombings against Turkey for the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK.
Feeling and not feeling: these are the traditional gender roles ascribed respectively to women and men, however misbegotten the division may seem. Yet beneath these stereotypes lurks another, given breath in Kipling's line about the female of the species being "more deadly than the male." A slightly different inflection on this is the so-called Amazon complex, whereby women in a mixed group adopt more macho roles than the men, which is said to have happened with Meinhof in the Red Army Faction.
At the siege of a Moscow theater by Chechen terrorists last October, 18 "Black Widows" -- veiled, wearing black from head to toe, with explosives strapped around their waists -- played a major role. The hostages who survived described the women as noticeably crueler and more determined than the male terrorists.
Chechnya
This year there have been a number of Chechen women suicide-bombers -- most recent were the two young women who killed themselves and 15 others when they blew themselves up at a rock concert in a Moscow stadium a fortnight ago. Yet Russia's elite Alfa anti-terrorist unit, which monitored the Chechens during the Moscow siege, learned that the women were not permitted to explode their bombs without a specific command from their male leader.
Are men in fact to blame for women in terrorism? Litvak certainly believes the role of women in Muslim suicide bombing is a function of patriarchal control: "Those who send these women do not really care for women's rights," he said.
"They are exploiting the personal frustrations and grievances of these women for their own political goals, while they continue to limit the role of women in other aspects of life," he said.
He also thinks that the use of women in terrorism has a simple practical application for their leaders.
"They believe that women can evade security checks more easily than men, since they arouse fewer suspicions," he said.
Of course, there is a difference between the lower-ranking female operatives in terrorist groups, and women who are planners and leaders, such as Meinhof, providing the intellectual backbone of the group. Throughout history, women have organized terror activities against states. The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 was a large-scale operation organized by a woman. Many other 19th-century revolutionaries, such as Vera Figner, were female. But sometimes women terrorists have simply cut their own path, like the woman who fired three shots at Lenin outside the Kremlin in 1918.
Generally, however, the modern female terrorist is well-knit into an organization, and not a lone wolf. The sexual dynamics of the group can be a problem, though. Some Islamic factions are uncomfortable with the idea of women and men working so closely together. In the Tamil Tigers, sexual relations between male and female members are prohibited. Yet in many European and South American groups, women members are often the wives or lovers of male terrorists.
Since Wafa's death, however, something has changed in the perception of the woman terrorist in Middle Eastern culture. Can increasing numbers of female terrorists, in a place where the role of women is traditionally subordinate, really be seen as a step forward for feminism? Coleman thinks not.
Feminist terrorists
"It is difficult to think of the word feminism associated with any group that professes fundamentalist views, in which women are held so much lower than men. Fanaticism and its death cults do not lead to liberation politics for women. Women may exhibit courage and steely resolve as terrorists but, if they are part of a system that affords them unequal status, then feminism doesn't apply," Coleman said.
Recently, Asharq Al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic newspaper, published an interview with a woman using the code-name Umm Osama, "the mother of Osama." Claiming to oversee the training of female mujahidin affiliated with al-Qaeda, she said.
"We are building a women's structure that will carry out operations that will make the US forget its own name, she said.
What is interesting about Umm Osama's declaration is the insistence on a "women's structure." Presumably separate, it clears a space for women terrorists in the social and political structures of traditional Islamic societies, where, in most cases, men and women occupy distinct roles. The US is taking this development seriously. A bulletin issued by the FBI states that law-enforcement agencies should remain alert to the potential of women working for the organization.
The only answer, for security agencies, is to use more female secret agents, such as the anonymous Iraqi-born author of Terrorist Hunter, who penetrated Islamist terrorist groups in the US. But, as she puts it: "The robes I wear not only help hide my identity; they also help hide my fear." A woman going undercover in a culture where women are not valued is in great danger -- even more danger than a man in the same position.
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