on Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, a new generation of women is emerging to help ensure the group's survival after all the drones and missiles have attacked the current leadership. The women of Al Qaeda, some operating in Europe and the United States, use the Internet to radicalize and recruit scores of male jihadis and send them to their deaths.
Women's participation in terrorism may be a natural progression from their involvement in the radical and revolutionary struggles of the past. The women of the nineteenth-century Russian terror group Narodnaya Volya were considered more willing to die than their male comrades.27 Women in radical organizations have engaged in anticolonial and revolutionary struggles in the Third World for decades. Beginning in 1968, women became involved in all manner of terrorist groups, from Marxist organizations in Europe to nationalist movements in the Middle East. Female terrorists came from all parts of the globe and from all walks of society—they were part of Italy's Red Brigades, Germany's BaaderMeinhof group, the American Black Panthers and Weathermen, and the Japanese Red Army; occasionally they were leaders in their own right. Women also played essential roles in several Middle Eastern conflicts, notably the Algerian Revolution (1958-62), the Iranian Revolution (1979), the First Lebanon War (1982), the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-91), and the Second or Al ‘Aqsa Intifada (since 2000).
Forty years of research on terrorism has revealed little about what motivates men and women to commit acts of terror. The majority of books portray women as the victims of terror,28 and only a handful have examined women as the perpetrators. The books perpetuate the stereotype of women as mere pawns or victims. After an attack by a female operative, terrorism experts, journalists, psychologists, and analysts frequently develop a so-called psychological autopsy, examining where the perpetrator grew up, where she went to school, and what went wrong to make her turn to violence.
The media fetishizes female terrorists. This contributes to the belief that there is something really unique, something just not right about the women who kill. We make assumptions about what these women think, why they do what they do, and what ultimately motivates them. Women involved in terrorist violence are demonized more than male terrorists. One former bomber told me that the enemy was so angry that women were involved in the organization that they would humiliate the female fighters more than their male counterparts just to teach them a lesson.29 For men in certain traditional societies, having women flout their authority, let alone defeat them in battle, is intolerable. After all, perpetrating acts that cause wanton destruction, death, and disorder seems incompatible with the traditional stereotype of what is expected of women—to be nurturing, caring figures who provide stability. The common assumption is that female terrorists must be even more depressed, crazier, more suicidal, or more psychopathic than their male counterparts. This runs contrary to the view of British journalist Eileen MacDonald, who found that women revolutionaries have stronger characters, more power, more energy, and are far more pragmatic than their male counterparts.30
Regardless of their initial motivation, what we know for a fact is that women are now more essential to terrorist organizations than ever before. The “exploding womb” has replaced the “revolutionary womb” that produced and supported young extremists in the past. Leaders of terrorist movements routinely make cost-benefit calculations to select the most effective tactics, targets, and operatives. Their analysis has shown that women are deadly.
2
THE BLACK WIDOW BOMBERS
And we will take with us the lives of hundreds of sinners. If we die, others will come/follow us—our brothers and sisters who are willing to sacrifice their lives (in God’s way) to liberate their nation…We are more keen on dying than you are on living. —Chechen videotape delivered to Al Jazeera, October 21, 20021
I guarantee you and guarantee all the Russians who send and support all those special services, which are sent here and commit…atrocities—your bandit groups are on our territory of the Caucasus—this is not the last operation. These operations will continue. They will continue on your territory, insh'Allah. —Dokku Umarov, in his YouTube video statement after the March 29, 2009, Moscow subway bombings2
THE CHECHEN WARS
Chechnya had always been a desolate backwater in the northern Caucasus, the mountain range that forms the geographical divide between Europe and Asia. The mountains average 10,000 feet above sea level and stretch 650 miles from the Caspian to the Black Sea. This rugged terrain is made all the more formidable by the steepness of the mountains' craggy slopes. A number of peoples and tribes have populated the region, including the Avars, Tatars, Kabardians, Laks, Khazars, Ossetians, Alans, and the Vainakh. Their relative isolation has insulated them from outside authority and influence.
The Chechen people, historically called the Vainakh, have always resisted outsiders, be they from Persia, Saint Petersburg, Constantinople, or, more recently, Moscow. Invasions and attempted invasions by the Romans, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and Russians were all repulsed. At the same time, the region was subjected to generation after generation of neglect and, on occasion, attempted ethnic cleansing campaigns. Violence has been an integral part of its history.
The Chechens converted from the pagan Vainakh religion to Islam and developed unique Sufi Naqshbandi traditions insulated from both Mother Russia's Orthodox Christian influence and the urban centers of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Their ancient customary laws (adat), differed from tribe to tribe. Many Chechen traditions violated the basic tenets of Islamic faith. They stored wine jars in their villages (aouls) despite Islam's prohibition against alcohol, and rarely paid their tithes (zakat) or went on the pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj). It was only in very recent times that the strictest interpretations of Islamic Wahhabi thought and Salafi traditions took hold, as Saudi Arabia poured men and resources into the area.
The region was first subjected to Russian domination by Grozny Ivan (Ivan the Terrible) in 1559. Chechen resistance can be traced to 1732, when Russian colonial forces were defeated in the village of Chechen-aoul by the Noxche tribe. In 1783, Catherine the Great, then seventy, sent her twenty-five-year-old lover, Prince Platon Zubov, to conquer the region as part of a campaign to convert all the Muslims in the Caucasus to the Christian faith. Prince Zubov described the Chechens as having a particular “enthusiasm for brigandage and predatory behavior, a lust for robbery and murder, perfidy, a martial sprit, determination, savageness, fearlessness, and unbridled insolence.”3 Catherine looked on them as a barbaric people whom she could subjugate by controlling Georgia to the south. The region was annexed to the empire in 1859. However, the first great Chechen Islamic leaders, Sheikh Mansour and, later, Imam Shamil, emerged during the Caucasian wars of 1817–64 and united the disparate tribes. Shamil's conflict with the Russians, remembered as the Jihad of Imam Shamil, set the tone for future waves of Chechen resistance.4 Shamil's Muslim warriors (murids) preferred death to defeat; no muridwas ever taken alive.5 When Chechen women in cliff-top villages perceived that defeat and capture were imminent, they reputedly threw their children over the precipice and jumped after them.6
According to Harvard professor Richard Pipes:
The Chechens…were always, from the Russian point of view, a troublesome element. Unassimilable and warlike, they created so much difficulty for the Russian forces trying to subdue the North Caucasus that, after conquering the area, the government felt compelled to employ Cossack forces to expel them from the valleys and lowlands into the bare mountain regions. There, faced by Cossack settlements on one side, and wild peaks on the other, they lived in abject poverty tending sheep and waiting for the day when they could wreak revenge on the newcomers and regain their lost lands.7
During the Russian Revolution, Chechens fought on both the Bolshevik and Menshevik sides and, once Lenin and his gang prevailed, select Chechens were co-opted into
