Female suicide bombers motive: revenge
Posted: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:04 AM
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Baghdad, Iraq
By Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief
Maha didn’t sound like the murderer she wants to be.
The 20-year-old sounded polite and soft-spoken as she told me about her plans to become a suicide bomber. Her motivation, as she told me over the phone (she was too scared to meet in person), is not political, patriotic, religious or even, like some male suicide bombers, bizarrely sexual; for her there would be no 72 houris, the dark-eyed female attendants some Islamic teachings say care for male martyrs in paradise.
There is no equivalent for female martyrs, no male houris.
Our talk took me back to a trash-filled street in Cairo where in 1997 I spoke with a group of young men, all poor, unmarried, undereducated Islamic radicals who were trying to convert me. They repeatedly stressed how virgins would dote me on me in heaven. One of the men pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket and held the yellow flame under my outstretched palm. I pulled back my hand in pain.
"Does that hurt you?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Just this tiny little flame hurts you? Now imagine what Hell fires would feel like for eternity. But in paradise there are virgins… virgins who smell like mangos," he said.
But Maha didn’t talk to me about rewards in paradise, but revenge in this life.
Driven to violence
Maha is a Sunni. Until a year ago, she was living with her husband and extended family in Baghdad. Her life quickly collapsed. Her husband moved to Syria, like many here to look for work and safety. Then a Shiite militia group -- she says the Mahdi Army -- killed her two brothers and burned her home. Maha became a refugee and moved in with other relatives in another Baghdad neighborhood. That’s when she was recruited.
"A neighbor saw that I was depressed and I told him I was so angry I could blow myself up," she said.
"There are groups that can help you do that," the neighbor said.
And he introduced them to her.
Maha said the neighbor took her to a Baghdad apartment where a 30-year-old woman taught her how to wear a suicide belt under her black abaya (robe) and approach a crowd. She now awaits further instructions.
Numbers increasing
Yesterday, we interviewed Mia Bloom, author of "Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror" and a scholar at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs. Her analysis of women like Maha and the dangers they pose in Iraq and elsewhere is worth quoting extensively.
"Percentage-wise, the number of women (suicide bombers) in Iraq is still fairly low, and I think this might be a reflection of the fact that at least within the most extreme Sunni organizations like al-Qaida there is disagreement about what role women should play."
So far there have been at least seven recorded cases of female suicide bombers in Iraq. Bloom expects the number to rise.
"It would seem that the number of women being used is increasing, and we have seen increasing numbers of women being used to kill civilians, because the women blend very well into a civilian population," she said, adding there is very little American troops can do to stop them. For now, only female U.S. soldiers or interpreters pat down women at checkpoints. Iraqi soldiers don’t do it at all.
"If the American forces start searching women who are traditionally dressed very invasively," Bloom continued, "it's going to aggravate and really incense the civilian population, and that helps the terrorists mobilize people to support them. And if we don't look at women at all because we don't want to irritate -- or we assume that women won’t be involved -- then women are the perfect operatives because they fall under our radar screen.
"So it's almost as if we are damned if we do, damned if we don't."
