An Islamic paradox: cook dinner or blow yourself up?
The first was Sanaa Muhaidily, when she was just 17.
She blew herself up in a white Peugeot at an Israeli roadblock in Lebanon.
That was 1985, and Hezbollah, the ‘Party of God’ in the country of the biblical cedars, had recruited Muhaidily and trained her to be a human bomb.
Being a walking explosive device, literally, was to be her jihad: her striving towards Allah and her fight against the invader.
Next came Wafa Idris, a paramedic for Palestine’s Red Crescent and the first female suicide bomber in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: she blew herself sky high in Jerusalem in 2002.
She was carrying nearly ten kilos of explosives in a backpack, and exploded in front of a shoe store in broad daylight. Idris killed herself and an elderly man – he was 81 – and injured over a hundred others.
Many other daughters, sisters, wives and mothers like Sanaa and Wafa have gone down that same road. Others are warriors in their own way. No explosive belt, no gun in hand: they take care of their children and do the cooking, and are there to help the martyrs in the family before their ‘missions’.
Others don’t stop at merely “lending a hand.” when they believe there’s a war. Some feel, like the Syrian woman named Um Jamal, they can do more, much more. According to an article in Newsweek Magazine, the woman was arrested in February in the town of al-Nabi Sheet in the Bekaa Valley, the heart of the impoverished countryside in eastern Lebanon, and charged with collaborating with the al-Nusra Front, a branch of al- Qaeda that operates mainly in Syria and Lebanon.
Jamal allegedly confessed to having been dispatched to scout out new female recruits for the group, who were to be tasked with taking part in “acts of sabotage”, according to reporter Janine Di Giovanni’s reconstruction of the events. If the Syrian activists are hearing rumours of an offensive by the rebel brigades in Syria itself, exactly three years after the start of the internal struggle against the loyalist forces linked to the President Bashar al-Assad, is the time ripe for kamikaze attacks, even by women, in this hot spot as well?
For the moment there’s not enough to go on to make this particular scenario a certainty. That said, just a few days after Jamal’s arrest, the al-Nusra Front struck in the Bekaa Valley. A suicide car bomb went off at a military checkpoint near Hermel, on the Syrian border. Two Syrian soldiers and one civilian were killed, and 15 more people were injured. Suicide bombers who are ready to die for their cause are a handy, inexpensive tool for terrorism. They can react to circumstances right on the field and change their targets at the last minute, all at a much lower price than the more complex operations. Further, women excite less suspicion, and kill more victims.
Since the early 1980s in Lebanon, before Sanaa Muhaidily came along – when the reports of human bombs concerned mostly young men, many of whom had just started shaving – the profile of the suicide bomber has changed to include female fighters: single, married, or well into middle age.
And statistics say that female kamikazes, on average, are better educated than their male counterparts. Israeli criminologist Anat Berko, author of the book The Path to Paradise, goes so far as to say that women “are the smarter of these smart weapons”, or suicide attacks, in the terrorists’ eyes. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the female jihad will bring human bombs of that sex to Syria, as it did in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq. But should it happen, al- Nusra could seed the culture of suicide as martyrdom, denied by conventional Islam, in a confused theatre of war where the notion of butchering civilians in the aid of political and other causes could take root. Un
til now, according to Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, the al- Nusra fighters have mostly used women to move explosives into Lebanon, making it past the army’s checkpoints without stirring any suspicion. It’s very likely that many of those women don’t grasp the bigger political picture behind what they’re doing.
As the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller noted in a report on the females who choose to embrace the most extreme variant of jihad, there may be conflicting reasons why a woman will strap explosives to her body in all good conscience: revenge, hopes of a better future, or feelings of extreme dissatisfaction and futility. Shefa’a al-Qudsi, a Palestinian who was caught shortly before blowing herself up, told Miller in 2007: “Women had only helped jihad by making food. I thought: We can do much more.”
The context in which the seeds of today’s Syrian revolution took root seem different from those in Palestine of yesteryear. Women have taken to the streets in Damascus and Aleppo, and in Dara’a they have taken part in public demonstrations and meetings with activists in Syria’s civilian community that are peacefully trying to oppose Assad. Most of these women never see action on the frontline, unlike the Kurdish female fighters in the PKK, but there’s no doubt that many of them have helped smugglers and militants.
