Sisterhood of Stealth

Originally Published:20060101.

THE BLOODBATH IN IRAQ PASSED A chilling milestone on 9 November when a Belgian woman who converted to Islam blew herself up in a suicide bomb attack on a US military convoy on the northern outskirts of Baghdad to become the world's first European female suicide bomber. Although she killed only herself, her actions added a deadly new dimension to the jihad being waged by Al Qaeda and its fellow travellers in the Middle East and Asia, and one which many western security services fear may soon engulf Europe.

The Belgian woman, identified as Mureille Degauque, aged 38, was traced through a recently issued Belgian passport she had carried, presumably to help her get past security checkpoints. According to Belgian authorities, the former bakery assistant came from a middle-class family in Charleroi, in the industrial belt south of Brussels. She converted to Islam after marrying a Belgian of Moroccan descent who became a militant and took her to Iraq to join the insurgency. The couple was among scores, possibly hundreds, of Muslims from Europe who have gone to Iraq to fight the US-led coalition.

Both appeared to have volunteered for suicide missions. A few days after Mureille blew herself up, US authorities in Baghdad said her husband was killed in a US Special Forces assault on a safe house run by a faction of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group blamed for most of the suicide attacks in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. He was wearing an explosives-rigged waistcoat when he and four companions were killed.

The use of a European woman by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which is led by the infamous Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, a Jordanian-Palestinian and the most wanted insurgent leader in Iraq, may have unveiled a new tactic by the jihadists who, like other militant groups, Muslim and non-Muslim, have been recruiting a growing number of women for suicide bombing missions. Some clearly volunteered for "martyrdom," while others may have been manipulated or duped.

But the use of female terrorists such as the notorious Black Widows of war-torn Chechnya, mostly women seeking revenge against the Russians for the death of loved ones or mass rapes, is spreading. According to US analyst Mia Bloom, who conducted an analysis of suicide bombings in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt and Iraq, 34% of such attacks since 1985 have been carried out by women.

Mureille and her partner may have marked another milestone in the annals of modern terrorism - the first husband and wife team to perish in action, even if they died separately. As fate would have it, the same day Mureille blew herself up in Baghdad an Iraqi couple was involved in a suicide attack in Jordan. Some 60 people were killed and hundreds wounded on 9 November in near-simultaneous suicide attacks on three hotels in Amman by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

In the bombing of the SAS Radisson Hotel, Ali Hussein Sumari, 35, detonated an explosive in the ballroom during a wedding reception. His wife, Sajida Mubarak Atrous Al Rishawi, also 35, was supposed to blow herself up there as well. But the trigger on her explosive belt failed and she fled, only to be arrested a day later.

On 13 November Al Rishawi appeared on Jordanian television recounting in a cold and unemotional monotone how she had failed in her mission. Showing no sign of remorse, she even displayed her (deactivated) bomb belt wrapped around her body. She said she had volunteered for a suicide mission because three of her brothers had been killed fighting US forces in and around the Iraqi city of Falluja; one brother was a senior aide to Zarqawi.

These days, Iraq seems to be the centre of female suicide bombing operations. On 28 September in the battle-scarred town of TaI Afar in northern Iraq, an unmarried female student, disguised in traditional male robes and headdress, detonated an explosive belt packed with ball bearings in a crowd outside an Iraqi police recruitment centere, killing seven people and wounding 40.

She was the first known female suicide bomber to strike since the insurgency began following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed her as one of their fighters and called her "blessed sister."

On 11 October the ever-widening insurgency saw its first suicide car bombing by a woman, in Mosul. She blew herself up in a vehicle near a US military patrol, causing a dozen casualties. Two days later the first woman suicide bomber of the Kashmir conflict perished in an abortive attack aimed at military forces near the town of Avantipur in the Indian-administer sector of the disputed territory.

One of the most militant Islamist groups fighting in Kashmir, Jaish-e Mohammed (Mohammed's Army) claimed responsibility for the attack. It carried out the first suicide bombing against India on Christmas Day 2000 when a 24-year-old Muslim from Birmingham, England, rammed an explosives ladened car into the Indian army headquarters in Srinagar, killing nine people.

These women were all Muslims fired by religious fervour. But nationalist groups have also used women suicide bombers extensively. The Tamil Tigers fighting for independence in Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka have since 1987 regularly send women on such missions, most dramatically to carry out the May 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Kurdish groups, which have fought the Turkish government for autonomy over two decades, have also done so.

Ideology has been the motivation in some cases. Indeed, the first suicide bombing, by either sex, was carried out in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon against Israeli forces in April 1985 by a 19-year-old Christian woman, Loula Abboud, on behalf of the Lebanese Communist Party. Hizbullah and others adopted the tactic with ferocious zeal, eventually forcing the Israelis to end their 22-year occupation of South Lebanon in May 2000.

But the growing use of women on suicide missions by Islamist groups is significant because it flies in the face of deeply held religious beliefs that Muslim women should not be warriors. Yet, since at least 2000, there has been a steady progression of suicide attacks carried out by women in far-flung zones of conflict, including Chechnya, Uzbekistan and Egypt.

Not all these suicide operations were bombings. On 30 April 2005 two veiled Egyptian women riddled a tourist bus with automatic weapons fire then shot themselves, presumably to avoid capture and torture. The motivation of the two women, both in their 20's, appears to have been revenge rather than religious zealotry. One was the sister of a bomber killed by Egyptian security forces, the other was his fiancé .

The use of women suicide bombers is clearly at its most destructive when backed by jihadist groups who are constantly widening their war against the West and its regional allies in the Middle East and Asia.

Recent attacks in Britain, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia and India, and thwarted operations in Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere, are testimony to how the jihadist tentacles of terror are extending as the tempo of such operations accelerates.

Nationalist-oriented combatants tend to confine their activities to their own doorsteps. Even the Palestinians have not carried their war beyond the confines of the Israel-Palestine theatre since the mid-1980s.

It is not clear whether the use of women shaheeds (martyrs) will spread in jihadist conflicts, but such operations would appear to be spreading geographically and it would make sense for militant groups to draw upon this new-found pool of womanpower.

Western Europe, home to 25 million Muslims increasingly marginalised and alienated by the secular societies that host them, is increasingly being seen as a target for the jihadists, particularly those recruited in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere on the Continent who, if they survive, will return one day with their hatred and their deadly combat skills. Chechen rebel leaders like Shamil Besayev now regularly employ the Black Widows for suicide missions - so far more than a score in which hundreds of people have perished. Basayev and Amir Al Khattab, who head the Islamist insurrection that began more than a decade ago, now view the female population of the region as a reservoir of kamikaze bombers.

There have been reports that the widow of a leader of the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, killed in 2004 by the Pakistani army in South Waziristan, a refuge for Al Qaeda activists, is training female suicide bombers in northern Pakistan.

But it is in Iraq, where there is the dismaying prospect of the insurgency escalating, that we should expect to see women playing an increasingly greater role in the bloodletting conducted by male-dominated jihadist groups and Al Qaeda's efforts to export the Iraqi insurgency within the Middle East underline this threat.

So, too, does an Arabic-language internet magazine that calls on Muslim women to volunteer for suicide attacks. It even provided fitness tips for aspiring mujaheda (female martyrs) - "breathing gymnastics to conquer the passions" - and advice on how to raise children to fight the infidel.

The magazine is called Al Khansa after a revered Arab poetess who was close to the Prophet Mohammed. She encouraged her four sons to join the warriors of Islam who fanned out from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th Century AD to carry Islam to the far corners of the known world. All died in battle.

The magazine is the first jihadist publication aimed exclusively at women. It has appeared on several extremist Islamic web sites following its launch in August 2004 and claims it was started "at the initiative" of two leading members of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia - Abdulaziz Al Moqrin, believed to be the movement's chief in the peninsula, who was shot dead in a gunbattle with security forces in June 2004; and Issa Saad Mohammed bin Oushan, killed in Saudi Arabia a month later.

A recent editorial says women Islamists "have set our lines next to our men to support them ... raise their children and be prepared. May God elevate us to martyrs." It added that "martyrdom for the sake of Allah" and gaining "the pleasure of Allah and His Paradise" should be the goal of Muslim women.

Even more startlingly, an article attributed to "Umm Badr" (Mother of Badr) entitled "Obstacles in the Path of the Jihad Warrior Woman," contends that the belief jihad is solely the preserve and duty of men is flawed and due to "a defective understanding of jihad." It stresses that "women have a right to join the fight, even without the approval of their menfolk.

"When jihad becomes a personal obligation, then the woman is summoned like a man, and need ask permission neither from her husband nor from her guardian, because she is obligated and none need ask permission in order to carry out a commandment."

(C) 2006 Middle East. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved