Bombshell

Women and Terrorism

Mia Bloom

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812208108
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Between 1985 and 2008, female suicide bombers committed more than 230 attacks—about a quarter of all such acts. Women have become the ideal stealth weapon for terrorist groups. They are less likely to be suspected or searched and as a result have been used to strike at the heart of coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This alarming tactic has been highly effective, garnering extra media attention and helping to recruit more numbers to the terrorists' cause. Yet, as Mia Bloom explains in Bombshell: Women and Terrorism, female involvement in terrorism is not confined to suicide bombing and not limited to the Middle East.From Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka, women have been engaged in all manner of terrorist activities, from generating propaganda to blowing up targets. What drives women to participate in terrorist activities? Bloom—a scholar of both international studies and women's studies—blends scrupulous research with psychological insight to unearth affecting stories from women who were formerly terrorists. She moves beyond gender stereotypes to examine the conditions that really influence female violence, arguing that while women terrorists can be just as bloodthirsty as their male counterparts, their motivations tend to be more intricate and multilayered. Through compelling case studies she demonstrates that though some of these women volunteer as martyrs, many more have been coerced by physical threats or other means of social control.As evidenced by the March 2011 release of Al Qaeda's magazine Al Shamikha, dubbed the jihadi Cosmo, it is clear that women are the future of even the most conservative terrorist organizations. Bombshell is a groundbreaking book that reveals the inner workings of a shocking, unfamiliar world.

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TERROR AND THE LOGIC OF OPPRESSION

The only position for women in the [movement] is prone.
—Stokely Carmichael, Black Panther leader, 1964¹

Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.
—Ulrike Meinhof, female leader of the German Red Army Faction, May 1968²

ASSASSINS,. THEN AND NOW

There is a long history of using violence to inspire terror. Historically, all the major religions—Muslim (Shi'a and Sunni), Christian, Hindu, Sikh, and Jewish—have employed terrorist violence, in many regions of the world. As far back as the Old Testament, Samson brought down the temple of the Philistines, killing those inside and himself in the process. Members of various early Christian, Muslim, and Jewish heretical sects were willing to sacrifice their lives for their beliefs, and occasionally sacrificed the lives of others as well. These groups used violence to frighten their enemies and to instill terror among the population with varying degrees of efficacy. The early groups, although inspired by religious fervor, were differentiated by their fundamental goals. Some hoped to expel a foreign occupier; others engaged in violence to celebrate their dedication to a cause, an idea, or a particular leader. The (Hindu) Thugs, (Muslim) Assassins, and (Jewish) Zealots all used terror and were principally motivated by religion.³

Much of what inspires religious terrorism today is reflected in the history of these early organizations. The early terrorists' desire for publicity, their indoctrination of children, their targeting of foreign occupiers, and attacks against collaborators are all surprisingly similar to the tactics used today in Israel, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis has written about the activities of the twelfth-century Nizari, an Ismaili Islamic sect more commonly known as the Assassins. The word assassin, which is still used today to describe a politically motivated murderer, can be traced to the Arabic word hashishiyyin, because the Nizari reputedly smoked hashish before engaging in acts of terror. Their primary goal was to purify Islam. They inflicted relatively few casualties, although in their heyday they posed a serious threat to the governments of the Seljuk Empire in Persia and the Levant. The account written by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century describes what many present-day Islamic suicide bombers think will be their ultimate heavenly reward. Speaking of the Assassin chief, Polo wrote,

The King had caused a certain valley between two mountains to be enclosed, and had turned it into a garden, the largest and most beautiful that ever was seen flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water; and numbers of ladies and of the most beautiful damsels in the world, who could play on all manner of instruments and sung most sweetly, and danced in a manner that it was charming to behold. For the Old Man desired to make his people believe that this was actually Paradise…So when the Old Man would have any Prince slain, he would say to such a youth: “Go thou and slay So and So; and when thou returnest, my Angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And should'st thou die nevertheless even so, I will send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise.” And in this manner the Old One got his people to murder any one whom he desired to get rid of.⁴

From 1090 to 1256 AD, the Assassins terrorized all who opposed them, killing grand viziers, ministers, and kings, and even attacking the Muslim hero Salah ad-Din. They battled the forces of Genghis Khan during the Mongol invasions of the Middle East. To spread their notoriety, they attacked prominent victims at venerated holy sites and at the royal court. They struck on Muslim holy days when crowds were present to maximize the publicity. Lewis explains that their weapon was “always a dagger, never poison, never a missile…and the Assassin usually made no attempt to escape; there was even a suggestion that to survive the mission was shameful.”⁵

The Assassins' goal was to return the Islamic community of believers (umma) into a single community, as had been the case under the first four rightfully guided caliphs, the successors to the Prophet, in the seventh century. By the twelfth century there were several centers of Islamic thought and devotion, which had been split apart by war and successive invasions. These splinters gave rise to different schools of Islamic jurisprudence and different interpretations of the faith, which pitted Muslims against other Muslims. The Assassins rebelled against the existing political order and sought to establish their own, one that would consist of a series of mountain fortresses and city states. To facilitate cooperation among the states, they established a network of supporting cells in sympathetic neighboring urban centers.

We can draw many parallels between the Assassins and contemporary Islamic fundamentalist groups that employ terror. Like the Assassins, many of the current movements indoctrinate their followers at an early age and rely upon adherents' dedication to charismatic leaders. Like the Assassins, Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri call for a restoration of the Muslim caliphate and unification of Islam against the non-believers. Like the Assassins, Al Qaeda and its offshoot organizations allege that Islam is surrounded by hostile neighbors and under attack and thus they must use any means necessary to fend off the apostates who would undermine their goal of a united community of believers.

Although there are many early examples of using violence to terrorize a population, the first modern suicide bombers, as far as we know, were the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II. Beginning in November 1944, young university-educated men used their bodies and their planes to attack the American fleet in the Pacific, especially targeting aircraft carriers and battleships.

Admiral Takijiro Onishi had asked the young men to volunteer for a “special attack” (tokkotai) meaning: transcending life and death. Onishi commanded the first squadron, known as Shinpu Tokubetsu Kogekitai. His reasoning was that Japan was nearly defeated, short of resources, and had nothing to lose by sending its young pilots on cost-effective suicide missions in the hope of deterring the enemy. Onishi explained that “if they [the pilots] are on land, they would be bombed down, and if they are in the air, they would be shot down. That's sad…Too sad…To let the young men die beautifully, that's what tokkotai is. To give a beautiful death, that's called sympathy.”⁶

In a letter to his parents, Second Lieutenant Shigeyuki Suzuki explained his reasons for volunteering for a kamikaze mission:

People say that our feeling is one of resignation, but they do not understand at all how we feel, and think of us as a fish about to be cooked. Young blood flows in us. There are persons we love, we think of, and many unforgettable memories. However, with those, we cannot win the war…To let this beautiful Japan keep growing, to be released from the wicked hands of the Americans and British, and to build a “free Asia” was our goal from the Gakuto Shutsujin year before last; yet nothing has changed…The great day that we can directly be in contact with the battle is our day of happiness and at the same time, the memorial of our death.⁷

In the Battle of Okinawa, from April to June 1945, more than two thousand kamikaze pilots rammed fully fueled fighter planes into more than three hundred ships, killing five thousand Americans in the most costly naval battle in U.S. history.⁸ Researcher Peter Hill found that only a minority of the kamikazes actually hit their targets. The Allied fleets deployed radar ships to spot the enemy planes, after which they bombarded them with antiaircraft fire. The Allies also enjoyed air superiority.

Not everyone in the Japanese high command believed that kamikaze attacks were a good strategy. First, it was an extremely expensive tactic to use a trained pilot and his aircraft for a single attack. It conflicted with the basic military principle of inflicting maximum damage on the enemy with the minimum loss to one's own resources. Second, plane-crash attacks lacked sufficient penetrative power to strike a mortal blow to the American aircraft carriers. To be effective, the kamikaze had to strike when the decks were fully laden with aircraft. Third, it was enormously difficult to evaluate the success of missions because the pilots never returned and their commanders had every incentive to overestimate the gains achieved by their men's sacrifice.

Although Japanese pilots committed the vast majority of the kamikaze attacks, similar missions were conducted by other countries. In April 1945, Germany used planes to crash into bridges to impede the Soviet armies closing in on Berlin. The pilots were reported to have signed a declaration saying, “I am above all else clear that the mission will end in my death.”⁹ There were at least two incidents of American suicide attacks on Japanese ships, one during the battle of Coral Sea in May 1942, the second at Midway that June. In both cases, the planes were either out of fuel or too badly damaged to return to base.

The most significant factor leading to the kamikaze strategy was the fact that Japan could not win against the American juggernaut using conventional forces. The kamikaze attacks inspired terror throughout the American fleet and helped convince American military leaders to deploy nuclear weapons against this nation whose people were so dedicated and so unafraid of death.

However, an attack by a person in uniform against a military target such as a battleship during a declared state of hostilities does not easily fit the current definition of terrorism. The modern definition assumes that the targets are civilians and the perpetrators are non-state actors: terrorist acts are perpetrated by clandestine organizations or illegal groups that are not directly tied to the institutions of government (although they may have support emanating from other countries). According to the strictest interpretation of the term with its emphasis on civilian casualties, several of the most famous attacks against U.S. targets would not constitute acts of terror. The 1983 attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, the attack in 2000 against the USS Cole in Yemen, and, to a lesser extent, the attack against the Pentagon on 9/11, all targeted military rather than civilian personnel.

Although there were instances of political violence to overthrow governments and assassinate world leaders from the seventeenth century on (for example, Guy Fawkes's attempt to kill King James I and blow up the British parliament in 1605), the concept of terror as a systematic use of violence to attain political ends was first codified by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. Robespierre deemed la terreur to be the “emanation of virtue” that delivered “prompt, severe, and inflexible” justice as “a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.”¹⁰ The Reign of Terror, a period of violence that lasted for one year between 1793 and 1794, represented the internecine conflicts between two political foes, the Jacobins and the Girondins, and was punctuated by mass executions of so-called enemies of the Revolution. The more extremist Jacobins exterminated thousands of potential enemies, regardless of their sex, age, or condition, in a battle between competing ideologies.

Our understanding of terrorism has shifted since the French Revolution to mean the deliberate targeting of civilians by non-state agents intending to cause fear and panic and so bring about political change. The U.S. State Department acknowledges, however, that there is no single definition of terrorism. It uses the term to mean premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. “International terrorism” means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country. In their definitions, scholars tend to place more emphasis on terrorists' intention to inspire fear among a target audience; the aim of persuasion transcends the harm caused to the immediate victims.¹¹

All of this is to say that, in effect, there is no clear agreement on exactly what terrorism is. Each organization and institution has its own definition, which tends, not surprisingly, to ensure that any attack against it counts as terrorism. The military does not emphasize that the victims have to be civilian, and business definitions do not suggest that an act of terror has to be purely political. By one recent count, there were in excess of 110 different definitions of terrorism and no clear consensus by international legal agencies about which was correct.

For members of anarchist political groups in the nineteenth century, being called a terrorist was a badge of honor. In 1901, anarchists assassinated American president William McKinley. His successor, Teddy Roosevelt, vowed to exterminate terrorism everywhere. He proposed deporting all anarchists back to their countries of origin, although many had not committed crimes and were opposed to terror. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson authorized Attorney General Palmer to round up all anarchists and ship them to the Soviet Union.¹²

The 1993 and 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center were certainly not the first (or second) occasions when New York's Financial District was targeted. Another anarchist, Mario Buda, blew up a wagon full of explosives there on September 16, 1920. The dynamite-laden wagon passed by lunchtime crowds and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District's busiest corner. Its cargo, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights, exploded in a timer-triggered detonation that sent thousands of slugs tearing through the air.¹³ The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments.¹⁴ Forty people were killed and two hundred injured. There was immediate panic and a national emergency was declared. Capitalism survived but it was widely assumed that President Wilson's roundup of anarchists was the motivation behind the blast.

According to UCLA professor David C. Rapoport, “The Russian writer Stepniak described the terrorist as ‘noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, uniting the two sublimities of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero.' Dynamite, a recent invention, was the weapon of choice for the male terrorist, because it usually killed the person who threw the bomb also, demonstrating that he was not an ordinary criminal.”¹⁵ A successful terrorist had to know how to fight and how to die, and the most admirable death occurred after a court trial where he or she accepted responsibility, and used the occasion to indict the regime. One of the earliest anarchists, the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, embraced the term “terrorist.” At her trial she indignantly insisted that she was a terrorist, not a murderer. Such distinctions would be difficult to make today.

According to Rapoport, terrorism has changed significantly over the decades. The groups that have emerged and the goals they espouse have adapted to changing global circumstances and, often, to the changing nature of how states deal with them. Rapoport argues that four waves of terrorism have defined the modern world. The first wave began in the 1880s with the anarchists. The second wave, an anticolonial movement beginning in the 1920s and lasting through the 1960s, pitted many small and new states against their colonial masters to help shake off imperial rule. Some forty years later, the New Left wave married terrorism with communism and was particularly popular in Latin America. Finally, beginning in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, which provided both inspiration and, occasionally, funds, a religious wave fused terror with religious justifications for violence.

The anticolonial wave included a wide variety of groups and organizations that not only directed their attacks against the colonial masters at home but also, when they had the means to do so, took the violence to the countries of the imperialists. This wave was the most diverse in the ways it brought together wildly different organizations, ranging from Palestinian terrorist groups to the Huk rebellion in the Philippines and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Some of the leaders of terror groups during the anti-colonial wave became legitimate leaders in their own right when that period ended. The transition from terrorist-cell leader to president or prime minister has resulted in confusion over who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter, a distinction that continues to plague our understanding of political violence. This is particularly evident when one considers that more former terrorist leaders than American presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Most terrorist organizations have understood their goals to be revolution, secession, or national self-determination. The principle that a people should govern itself was a legacy of the American and French revolutions; the concepts of self-determination and national identity played key roles in both upheavals. Later, President Wilson's Fourteen Points, his hoped-for outcome of World War I, emphasized the right of all peoples to self-determination and freedom from colonial rule. To this day, the heads of terrorist movements often see themselves as the future leaders of their people. But the terms “people” and “self-determination” can both be ambiguous.¹⁶ The drive for self-determination may prompt leaders of terrorist movements to dream of a future in which they replace the current regime or government and transform the political landscape. However, this process requires that the population as a whole supports what the group does in its name.

Most terrorist organizations begin quite small, as a dedicated group of true believers, existing on the outer edges of society, who use violence to spread their message. They begin by engaging in criminal activity—drug-smuggling, bank-robbery, hostage-taking, and the like—to fill their war chests. Once they obtain the money to acquire more sophisticated weapons, they raise the stakes by challenging the government, their rivals, or the institutions of the state such as the army or the police. With every attack they launch, the organizations hope that the state will reveal its brutality. When governments overreact, this plays right into the terrorists' hands.

Many civilians die as a result of heavy-handed counter-terrorist responses, and those individuals who couldn't decide which side they were on initially begin to migrate toward the terrorist groups. Without the violent overreaction by the government forces, terrorist groups could not possibly hope to replenish the ranks of lost operatives.

For rebels seeking publicity or hoping to spread their message, terrorism, and suicide terrorism in particular, may succeed when traditional methods of insurgency fail. In a world in which, according to media lore, “if it bleeds it leads,” terrorism bleeds a lot, and suicide terrorism even more so. However, most groups do not begin their campaigns against the state using suicide terrorism. There was no suicide terrorism in the first Chechen war. The first Palestinian intifada did not include suicide terrorism among the many clashes between Palestinians and Israelis. The first W...