Female Suicide Bombers: The New Factor in Mideast's Deadly Equation

If one seemed like an aberration, four seems a phenomenon: Four women, equipped with explosives, far less suspect than their brothers. Four women who, because of their gender, do not -- or at least did not -- fit the profile of a Palestinian suicide bomber. Four women, one a seamstress and one an ambulance worker, one in college and one in high school, who left four stricken families and one shocked fiance. Their relatives wavered between rejoicing and sobbing, and several said they'd never seen it coming.

"If I knew she was planning this, I would have stopped her," the mother of 20-year-old Andaleeb Takafka, the most recent of the four, has said. Her father, meanwhile, has been quoted praising their daughter's final act: detonating a belt of explosives at a Jerusalem bus stop April 12, killing six Israelis.

It began with Wafa Idriss. On Jan. 28, when the 28-year-old walked into a shopping district on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road and blew up herself and an 81-year-old Israeli man, Idriss's gender became the latest benchmark of how polarized and chaotic the Middle East has become. For some, she became a role model.

Idriss and the three female bombers who followed have been absorbed into a growing Palestinian cult of martrydom. Their images have appeared on posters, and a poem has been dedicated to one of them. A columnist for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd compared Idriss to Mona Lisa, praising her "dreamy eyes and the mysterious smile on her lips," according to a translation. The four women have sparked debate among Muslim clerics over their religious acceptability (must a female bomber be accompanied by a male escort?). They have, in short, been made into legends.

And yet they are unexpected. Women.

Palestinians, like Americans, tend to link violence with men. Some Middle East experts say the four female suicide bombers represent a subtle shift in Palestinian culture, just as the progression of suicide bombing from fringe tactic to organized strategy also reflects a shift. Since 1993, there have been more than 100 such bombings -- about 60 of them during the current intifada.

"Conditions in the territories have created such a level of desperation, of rage, of hatred, that the pool of potential bombers, of recruits, has expanded," says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist who served in the U.S. Special Forces and now advises the president of Rand Corporation, a California-based research organization.

Just who is surprised by Wafa Idriss and the women who followed her? For some, the intifada has made the rise of female suicide bombers inevitable.

Islah Jad, a Palestinian born in Cairo who teaches women's issues at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, says women are subject to the Israeli "humiliation policy" as much as men. She asked her female students recently:

" 'It's not strange for you as women to see such kinds of action?' . . . Most of my students said, 'Why? Why are you surprised? It was surprising for women not to join.' "

Just as suicide bombings are not unique in history -- think of the kamikaze missionsof Japanese pilots in World War II, the Tamil Tigers struggling for an independent homeland in Sri Lanka -- neither are women in that role. In 1991, a female Tamil Tiger assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi during a political rally by detonating explosives strapped to her body.

History is not short on examples of women terrorists. One of the better-known is Leila Khaled, who, on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, hijacked a plane in 1969. In 1987, North Korean Kim Hyon Hui helped plant a time bomb on a South Korean airliner, killing all 115 people on board. She tried to bite into a cyanide capsule when she was caught.

The profile of the Palestinian suicide bomber has changed over the nine years since the first one struck. Jenkins says that early on, the typical perpetrator was a "young man, probably 18 to 22, not particularly well educated, probably lower economic strata."

And now there is Idriss.

"That was very shocking to Israel," says Charles Kimball, a religion professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in Middle East and Islamic studies. "You're on the lookout for some young boy wearing bulky clothing, and then suddenly . . . any woman could be a suicide bomber."

With the increasing violence of the current uprising, and with religious and secular political groups competing for predominance among Palestinians, suicide bombing has become mainstream, many analysts say.

"Admission to this mainstream culture is martyrdom, and women want in," says Rona Fields, a District psychologist who has spent 30 years studying terrorist cultures.

Many say this culture draws on a spirit of nationalism above and beyond religious fervor.

"The role of women in this phenomenon is really a function of what I call the secularization of the phenomenon," says Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And indeed, while"Islamist" groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been less willing to embrace female suicide bombers, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a more secular group, has claimed all four, and after the death of Idriss, it reportedly started a unit devoted to recruiting more women.

"A very significant hidden burden had shifted onto the women in the occupied territories," says M. Cherif Bassiouni, who was born in Egypt and teaches law at DePaul University. You have "some younger women not wanting to remain in the hidden role of scavengers for food, or trying to find thread to put a shirt together after it was torn, or having to find wood for a fire. Life had become so primitive."

And perhaps Palestinian women especially were disposed to respond to the crisis through decisive -- if violent -- means. Their society is male-dominated, but "of all the different Arab societies . . . always Palestinian women have been the most liberated," Fields says. "They were the best educated . . . and they were the least bound by traditional roles."

According to translations provided by a Washington-based nonprofit, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a considerable number of Muslim clerics and newspaper columnists in the Arab world came out in support of Idriss. As one Hamas leader was quoted as saying: "Jihad against the enemy is an obligation that applies not only to men but also to women."

But there has also been controversy. In the London-based newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, said women waging "jihad and martyrdom" required male escorts in some instances. He added that there were still plenty of men "demanding to participate" and it was preferable to use them for now.

The "opinion of many classical jurists," says Khaled Abou el Fadl, who teaches Islamic law at UCLA law school, is that when it comes to defending territory, Islam dictates that the "duty falls first on men." (There is much dispute over whether the Koran sanctions suicide bombings. It forbids suicide and the killing of innocents, but praises as "martyrs" those who are killed "in God's way.")

Some who study Palestinian society say the emergence of female suicide bombers can be interpreted, perversely enough, as reflecting what Fields calls "a demand for equal status."

Before Ayat Akhras, 18, blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket last month, killing a security guard and a 17-year-old Israeli girl, she taped a martyr statement.

"I am going to fight instead of the sleeping Arab armies who are watching Palestinian girls fighting alone," she said, in an apparent jab at Arab leaders.

For some women, says Jad, it might be a way of saying, "We are not less men than men."

Says Fields: "It's a terrible, horrible way to achieve equality."

Most experts say the main reasons women become suicide bombers mirror the motivations of their male counterparts: daily deprivation, a lack of military resources with which to counter Israel's tanks and well-equipped soldiers, and a belief that martyrdom will transport them to Paradise.

But there are also individual circumstances. Idriss, a divorcee, saw bloodshed up close in her volunteer work assisting medics. Dareen Abu Aisheh, who blew herself up in February, wounding three policemen at a checkpoint, had lost members of her extended family in shootings.

Vivian Khamis, a Palestinian professor of psychology at Bethlehem University, who calls the bombings "martyrdom operations" and declines to condone or condemn them, says tomorrow's suicide bombers are being formed right now.

"Children watch people around them. They watch other kids, they watch TV, so those are their own models. . . . Many girls now, also they want guns."