A Newsweek article, Women of Al Qaeda, to be published in their 12/12/2005 issue, profiles the women who’ve recently chosen to become suicide bombers in the name of Islam. This is a summary.
- September, 2005 – Unnamed woman, suicide bomber that killed 5, wounded 30, Tal Afar, Iraq, near Syrian border
- October, 2005 – unnamed woman and husband attack an American patrol in Mosul
- November 9, 2005 - Sajida Mubarak al-Rishawi, 35, the would-be Jordanian bomber whose bomb belt failed to go off while her husband’s, to whom she’d been married for less than a week, did. Her three brothers and sister’s husband died fighting against the Americans.
- November 9, 2005 - Muriel Degauque, 38, blew herself up attacking Iraqi police, Baqubah, Iraq
The article postulates that the use of women suicide bombers will make American soldiers suspicious of women, particularly pregnant women, and searching them “invasively” will create popular anger - "It's a win-win proposition for the terrorists," Mia Bloom author of “Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror”
Recruiting women as suicide bombers is seen as a late stage / entrenched tactic, "It comes when the battle escalates to all sectors of society. It happens after men become activists in guerrilla groups, fight and die, perhaps in suicide attacks. Then the widows or family members —seek vengeance, or want to give their life in the same cause." – Haizam Amirah Fernandz, a Madrid-based analyst. The article as well as Mia Bloom also proposes that the trend of violence is empowering to these women, especially the modern Palestinian ones chosing that route.
Women fighters and terrorists are nothing new, Palestinian women being engaged in attacking Israel since the 1970s. The first suicide bomber, 27 year old Wafa Idris, killed an Israeli civilian and wounded 140 in January, 2002.
The article states that there’s been much religious legal debate as to using women as suicide bombers and not until January 2004 did a Palestinian Hamas woman, Reem al-Riashi, mother of two, carry out a mission.
Religious scholars who endorse suicide attacks have come up with a paradise for women as an alternate to the male bombers popularized “72 virgins” – as related by Thauria Hamur, 26, captured before completing her mission she said women martyrs would “become the purest and most beautiful form of angel at the highest level possible in heaven.”
Groups which've used women suicide bombers:
- Liberation Tigers in Sri Lanka (non-Muslim)
- Chechnya’s “black widows”
- Palistinan “army of roses”