Women, Jihad and Terrorism
Category : Women Gossip
In October, Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed that a second female bomber, this time accompanied by her husband, killed herself attacking an American patrol in Mosul. And last week the world learned of the third: Muriel Degauque, 38, a fair-skinned Belgian from the grim rust-belt city of Charleroi near the French border. As a girl, she often ran away from home. As a woman, she had a succession of failed relationships with Muslim men: a Turk, an Algerian and finally a Belgian of Moroccan descent who followed the teachings of radical Salafists, similar to those of Al Qaeda.
They went to live for at least three years in Morocco, and when she returned home she was fully veiled: alienated, lonely, in the thrall of a husband who consumed her entire world. Muriel—now calling herself Myriam—”couldn’t have children,” a spokesman for the Belgian prosecutor’s office said last week. Even when she was near her parents, she rarely spoke to them. The last they heard from her was during the summer. On Nov. 9, she blew herself up attacking Iraqi police near the town of Baqubah. American troops gunned down her husband shortly after Myriam was killed.
There will be more women launching more attacks, a fact that is provoking new and growing concern among U.S. officials. Until recently, many analysts in American government agencies saw the threat of women suicide bombers as a largely theoretical problem. Their best judgment was that “Al Qaeda Central”—the close-knit organization around Osama bin Laden and ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri—would resist any effort to use women as homicidal martyrs. But after the incidents of the past few weeks, they are taking the threat of female Islamic terrorists, particularly suicide bombers, much more seriously, according to two U.S. counterterrorism officials who asked for anonymity because they were discussing intelligence matters.
In jihadist propaganda, the invasion and violation of Muslim lands is intimately tied to the violation of Muslim women, either directly or through the corrupting role of Western values and attitudes. In its 1988 covenant, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas laid out its view of “the Muslim woman” as “the maker of men” and the educator of future generations—the person who prepares future fighters. “The enemies have realized the importance of her role,” says the fundamentalist manifesto. “They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up the way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle.”
In the Middle East, Palestinian women have been among the ranks of fighters and terrorists attacking Israel since at least the 1970s, but the first to become a suicide bomber was Wafa Idris, a 27-year-old ambulance worker, who killed an Israeli civilian and wounded 140 in January 2002. In death she became a celebrity. More women and girls volunteered to die for a branch of Yasir Arafat’s secular Fatah organization. He talked of an “army of roses,” and the leadership of the radical religious organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were taken by surprise. Sheik Yassin, the crippled spiritual leader of Hamas, opposed the use of women as bombers. There were more than enough men, he said.
Still, Palestinian women clamored to fight and die to try to free their homeland. They argued that since the days of the Prophet Muhammad, women warriors have battled for the banner of Islam. Yassin and other religious scholars eventually gave ground, but only after debating how long a woman on a suicide mission could be away without a chaperone—before she died.
Not until January of last year did a woman from Hamas carry out an operation. Reem Riashi, a mother of two, recorded a videotape before her mission, saying she hoped her “organs would be scattered in the air” and her soul “would reach paradise. ” Would there be 72 hours to greet her there? No. The religious scholars who endorse suicide attacks have described an alternative paradise for women. Thauria Hamur, a 26-year-old captured by the Israelis before she could set off a bomb in May 2002, told NEWSWEEK in a prison interview that women martyrs would “become the purest and most beautiful form of angel at the highest level possible in heaven.”
As Mia Bloom writes in a forthcoming book, “The underlying message conveyed by female bombers is: Terrorism has moved beyond a fringe phenomenon and insurgents are all around you. ” But that is only the message for their enemies. In their own world, their willingness to carry out suicide attacks means something different. Among Palestinians, for instance, “the idea of violence empowering women has spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” writes Bloom. Suicide bombing is changing the rules of deference and subservience that have dominated the traditional society—a strange path to liberation for women hidden behind veils and burqas.
Can the West offer something better? Something to defuse the explosive anger of jihadist widows bent on vengeance, or young women craving freedom from foreign occupation for themselves and their people? In the comfort of Wash-ington, the answer would seem an obvious yes: education, jobs, equal rights. But in the dusty alleys of Tall Afar, the arid hills of Waziristan, the rubble of Grozny, the walled-off villages of the West Bank and maybe even the dilapidated rows of factory housing in Belgium, the answer may not always be so clear. In a television interview last week, after the people of Belgium learned to their horror that their Muriel had died as a suicide bomber in Iraq, Glenn Audenaert, director of the federal police, said he was not surprised to find such a woman in the ranks of people who “embraced the ideology of Al Qaeda.” “It’s a new generation, and, perversely, emancipation allows women to aspire to martyrdom,” he said.
Finding another answer that is right—a variety of answers, in fact, for many unique societies—will help make the difference between an endless war of terror with “insurgents all around” and a fight that is won, with a peace that endures.
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