WOMEN AND TERRORISM
MIA BLOOM
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4390-1
To my loving husband, John,for everything he does and everything he is
CONTENTS
Preface
Prologue: Moscow, March 2010
1 A Brief History of Terror and the Logic of Oppression
7 The Recruiters and Propagandists
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
As the number of female terrorists and suicide bombers has increased several hundredfold in the past few years, the trend has been accompanied by a barrage of misinformation and misperception about what is actually going on. Many people have assumed that women could not consciously choose to participate in terrorism of their own volition. The underlying assumption is that a man made her do it. In their attempts to explain women's involvement in terrorism for a general audience, journalistic accounts have presented a far too simple and unidimensional account of the phenomenon.
We need to work past gender stereotypes and begin to examine the conditions that really influence female violence. We do not want to excuse the women's behavior, nor do we want to denude their actions of their political motivation. Lots of women are just as bloodthirsty as the male members of terrorist groups, but women's motivations tend to be intricate, multi-layered, and inspired on a variety of levels. Anger, sorrow, the desire for revenge, and nationalist or religious zeal coalesce in ways that make any simple explanation impossible. Given that terrorist groups gain so much from women's participation, it is far easier to understand why terrorist groups seek female activists than to explain why women oblige them by heeding the call to action.
I have attempted to make these complexities accessible for as wide an audience as possible, from the general reader to the counter-terrorism analyst. I aim to clarify the various reasons why women might choose terror and to explain the many roles they take on when they make that choice.
My work has always sought to bridge the divide between political science and policy. To understand what is going on, I have found we need to better understand the past. If we fail to take into account the history of violence, we will never be able to anticipate what is likely to happen in the future.
The stories presented in this book shed light on the conditions under which women are mobilized themselves or mobilize others for terrorism. The book also explains the unique pressures women face during conflict and how they can become involved in the struggle, sometimes against their will. The women presented here encompass a spectrum of involvement and provide an insider's view of the many faces of women and terror.
In any book focused on only a handful of cases, it is important to address the issue of case selection and to explain why these cases in particular were chosen. In this book, because of how terrorism is defined, I opted to focus on women who were primarily involved in terrorist activities. Thus the female Maoist insurgents in Nepal, while certainly compelling, were excluded from this study since their major activities are not terrorism. My goal was also to focus on women's involvement in current terrorist organizations and especially those where we know very little or have gotten the story wrong in the past. To this extent I briefly discuss women's involvement in terrorism from the time of the anarchists at the turn of the century (Narodnaya Volya) to the 1960s and 1970s, when women were key figures in the Italian Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction (Baader Meinhof). In truth, many of the cases chosen for this study were based on the accessibility of interviews, the availability of high-quality secondary sources if primary interviews were not possible, and my previous expertise with various regions around the world in order to be able to judge the quality of the materials (both in the personal interviews and in the secondary sources).
My long-standing experience with the Arab-Israeli conflict made the case study of Ahlam Al-Tamimi compelling as she has since the Sbarro Pizzeria attack become the new feminine face of Hamas. My own fieldwork and experiences in Sri Lanka also led me to compare the women of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam with the women of other terrorist organizations, merging my own interviews with those conducted by journalists. My field research in Northern Ireland and access to several women who were former members of the provisional IRA made that part of the study invaluable. My fascination with the women of the Jemaat Islamiyya in Indonesia and the fact that so little is known about them encouraged me to contrast these women with the women of Al Qaeda and those in the Chechen conflict.
Most of all, it was crucial for me to demonstrate that terrorism is not a purely Islamic phenomenon, and also that the women involved in terrorism play a variety of roles in those movements. While the media might often focus exclusively on the bomber, women have been engaged in all manner of terrorist activities, from generating propaganda to blowing up targets.
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