The mastermind is none other than the planner of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi. The group of women terrorists, named Dukhtareen-e-Taiba, will be unleashed in the Kashmir Valley through the Uri sector, according to an Indian defence report.
So far, Indian intelligence has detected 42 terrorist training camps across the border, which is believed to have women as members.
In the twisted world of jihad in the Middle East, female terror brigades are a new, controversial phenomenon. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the leader of al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden’s death, publicly disapproved the use of women in terror, and Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda branch operation in Syria, is against women being recruited for the holy war. In 2012, al-Zawahiri’s wife reportedly wrote that war “isn’t easy for women… because a woman has to be with a mahram [male guardian] when she moves.” Muqatilat, which means women fighters in Arabic, are an important part of today’s Islamist brigades, either with a group or acting independently.
Al Aan News, Dubai, reported that in Aleppo, the Free Syrian Army, an anti-Assad group initially formed by defected Syrian Army officers, has 80 female fighters in its ranks, who were trained by the People’s Defense Units (YPG) to use RPGs to snipers. Some of them are five years old. In the complex alliances and enmities between the jihadists in Syria, YPG is the national army of Syrian Kurdistan, which stops any terror group bringing the Syrian Civil War to Kurdish areas. Syria is the new safe haven for terrorists like Boumeddiene, and the hundreds of Muslim women who travel to Iraq to experience the bizarre romance of sex-jihad with the fighters. Fusako Shifenobu, the world’s most wanted female terrorist who planned attacks on American consulates in the 1980s, is living in Syria today, but her whereabouts are a secret.
A world terrorism report states at least eight of Boko Haram’s recent suicide attacks have been carried out by women; some were 16-year-old girls. The Nigerian terror outfit that shot to notoriety by massacring and kidnapping schoolchildren has more than 150 female suicide bombers aged under 15 waiting to be unleashed. Experts say many times, the women bombers, especially the children, are unaware that they are carrying explosives, which are detonated by remote control by a handler standing a safe distance away. Last Saturday, in Maiduguri, Nigeria, a 10-year-old female suicide bomber blew up 19 people and injured 18.
Though the Tamil Tigers used female bombers extensively (former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed by one), the first female suicide bomber was a 17-year-old Lebanese girl named Sana’a Mehaidli, motivated by the Syrian Socialist National Party (SSNP) to blow up an Israeli convoy in Lebanon in 1985, killing five Israeli soldiers. The SSNP carried out a total of 12 suicide bombings, and seven of the bombers were women.
Female operative of Ansar al-Sunnah in Iraq—known as the “Mother of Believers”—Samira Jassim recruited, indoctrinated and trained around 80 women suicide bombers. She even got some of them raped by Islamist fighters to shame them into conducting the suicide attacks, because a raped woman loses her honour and can even be sentenced to death in conservative Islamic countries.
The West at War
What is worrying Western agencies the most is the growing number of American and European women going to Syria to be trained as female terrorists. A former Catholic who had converted to Islam in her twenties, Irish-born Samantha Lewthwaite is called the world’s most dangerous woman, nicknamed the “White Widow”. She masterminded the 2013 Nairobi attacks on a shopping mall which killed 72 people, including several children. Samantha’s husband Germaine Lindsay was one of the suicide bombers involved in the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks in London.
Michigan-born Nicole Lynn Mansfield was the first American IS Muslim convert to die in Syria. On June 2, 2006, Sonja B, a German convert to Islam, was arrested for planning to carry out a suicide attack in Iraq. James Foley was executed by the IS because the US would not release Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-educated neuroscientist known as ‘Lady al Qaeda’, from a Texas jail—prisoner number 90279-054— incarcerated for planning to carry out a ‘mass casualty attack’ in America, including spreading Ebola and using a dirty bomb.
British women numbering around 60 are suspected to be in Syria to fight with the IS. American Colleen La Rose, alias Jihad Jane, was convicted in 2010 for plotting to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for “insulting Islam”. One of LaRose’s recruits was Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, another American convert to Islam. Ramirez allegedly accepted LaRose’s invitation and moved to Europe, where, according to court documents, they planned to live and train with terrorists. Canadian woman convert Amanda Korody was jailed for a failed attack on the British Columbia legislature in 2013.
Like in Boumeddiene’s case, terror experts believe that most female converts are prompted by Muslim male partners, like with Katherine Tsarnaev—widow of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev—who is on the radar for complicity in the attacks and 19-year-old Shannon Conley who was arrested for aiding IS fighters in Syria. “This was happening for a very long time but they were acting as only sleepers, couriers and messengers. The new thing is that they have been strapped with explosives now. Surprisingly, we have noticed that they are highly indoctrinated and motivated and being used as jihadi motivator. Even in India, motivation was always there. They were encouraged; we ignored and did not follow their tracks,” says Amar Bhushan, former Special Secretary, R&AW.
The UK government said women comprise about 75 per cent of the 5,000 British citizens who convert to Islam every year. The Telegraph, London, reported that British female jihadis have formed the al-Khanssaa brigade, an IS woman militia which functions as religious police force to punish women for “un-Islamic behaviour”. Aqsa Mahmood, 20, is believed to be the leader of al-Khanssaa, according to researchers at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR). The Scottish schoolgirl of Somalian ancestry from Glasgow who dropped out of university studies and now lives in Syria, has adopted the name ‘Umm Layth’. After the Paris killers were shot dead by the French police, she praised the terrorists on Twitter, “May Allah accept the France brothers, shaheed in sha Allah!! Allahu Akbar!
“Our dead are not dead and they will enter Jannah [heaven], while your dead are in hellfire!!”
The participation of women in terror wars were earlier restricted to supportive roles. Western women converting to radical Islam came to the attention of intelligence agencies when Muriel Degauque, a Belgian woman from Charleroi who became a Muslim, blew herself up in Iraq in November 2005, attacking a US Army convoy. The same day, 1970-born Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, a would-be female suicide bomber, the wife of Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, who killed 38 people during the bombings at an Amman hotel, and the sister of a senior al-Qaeda operative in Iraq, was arrested when her explosives vest malfunctioned.
Chechnya, where the Russian Army brutally suppressed Islamic nationalists, became the ground zero for female terrorism. The Shahidka, called “Black Widows”, are Chechen female suicide bombers who believe in violence. Their commander Shamil Basayev confessed to the Russian police that the Shahidka, alternatively called the Brides of Allah, are a crucial section of his suicide bomber squad known as the Riyad-us Saliheen (Brigade of Martyrs.) Many of the husbands of the “Black Widows” were killed by the Russian Army in Chechnya.
The first “Black Widow” to die in action was Khava Barayeva, who detonated her suicide vest at a Russian Army base in Chechnya in June 2000. In May 2003, Shakhida Baimuratova, another “Black Widow” bomber, killed 16 people and wounded 150 at a crowded Muslim festival in Ilishkan Yurt. On December 9, 2003, a bomb was exploded outside the Hotel National, Moscow, just a few hundred metres from the Kremlin, by suicide bomber Khadishat Mangeriyeva. In 2004, two Russian passenger aircraft were brought down by two Chechen women Amanat Nagayeva and Satsita Djerbikhanova. On September 1, 2004, two Chechen women, Roza Nagayeva and Mairam Taburova, participated in the Beslan school hostage crisis in which 334 civilians, including 186 children, were killed.
According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Dutch terror researcher Jolande Withuis records that the desire to know more about the Quran prompts newly converted Western Islamist women to know more about the holy book on the Internet, where they become suicide fodder for radical Salafist online recruiters. French Islam expert Olivier Roy told The Washington Post, “For al-Qaeda, (women) converts are not just tools to get past security. It’s a way for them to become a global movement.”
Gender Bender
Historically, women have been an important mainstay of all insurgent movements. They played a prominent part in the Russian Narodnaya Volya in the 19th century, the Irish Republican Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 was planned by a woman.
According to terrorism expert Mia Bloom, assistant professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia and the author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, Lebanon was where it all started with women bombers attacking Israeli soldiers. From there, the deadly trend spread to Sri Lanka, Turkey, Chechnya, Israel, Iraq and now Syria.
Writes Washington DC-based counter-terrorism analyst Clara Beyler, who was a researcher for the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, Israel: “When women become human bombs, their intent is to make a statement not only in the name of a country, a religion, a leader, but also in the name of their gender.” Writing on the first Palestinian Muslim female suicide bomber Wafa Idris, a 27-year-old divorcee who volunteered as a paramedic, Giles Foden, in his article ‘Death and the Maidens’ that appeared in The Guardian, notes: “The bomb in her rucksack was made with TNT packed into pipes. Triacetone triperoxide, made by mixing acetone with phosphate, is ground to a powder. In a grotesque parody of the domestic female stereotype, it is usually ground in a food.”
Even though women suicide bombers exhibit uncompromising resolve in carrying out their deadly missions, by no means are they accepted as equals by the male Islamist fighters. In Falluja, last week, IS fighters reportedly beheaded at least 150 women, some of them pregnant, for refusing to marry them. Data shows that most women suicide bombers have little status in Islamic society, being widows or rape victims. Says Bloom, “In fact, in several instances, the women were raped or sexually abused not by representatives of the state but by the insurgents themselves.
As such they are stigmatised, and thus easily recruited and exploited.” Palestinian women fighters are excluded from male-dominated paramilitary terrorist factions, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. In Sri Lanka, where LTTE women fighters were 30 per cent of the suicide attackers, there were very few female leaders. In India, too, gender inequality prevails among the Islamists with women playing a secondary role.
Invisible Factor
After the NIA crackdown on female jihadi training centres in West Bengal, senior Indian security officials said, “Women are not primary terror suspects and can easily melt into the crowd. They can also be used to provide protective cover to hardcore militants by posing as a ‘couple’, thus reducing suspicion substantially.”
Strangely, it has emerged that Boumedienne was more radical than her partner Coulibaly, according to his attorney George Sauveur. It was a classic case of intel failure—Boumeddiene and her co-conspirators were under phone, Internet and physical surveillance at the end of 2011, which was called off deeming her low-risk. In 2010, during a visit to Djamel Beghal, a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist, Boumeddiene and Coulibaly took photos together, which she told the cops was only “crossbow practice”. Initial reports about her background revealed a broken family, and such poverty that she had to literally beg for furniture for her council flat.
Under Coulibaly’s influence, she began to wear the veil, prohibited in France. She had told the police earlier that she had been inspired by her husband and other radicals to study religion and the world’s current wars. “When I saw the massacre of the innocents in Palestine, in Iraq, in Chechnya, in Afghanistan or anywhere the Americans sent their bombers, all that… well, who are the terrorists?” she told the police. Only the terror widows have the answer.
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