Meet the New Face of Terror

Chilling as all this is, female suicide bombers still account for only a handful of the hundreds of suicide attacks conducted by radical Islamic groups each year. The main way that women have played a greater role in such operations is by taking on auxiliary functions -- running Web sites, managing a cell's finances, helping with logistics, even urging on their husbands a la Lady Macbeth. Last summer, for example, Cossor Ali, a young British woman of Pakistani descent, was charged with withholding knowledge of her husband Abdullah's involvement in a plot to blow up as many as 10 American airliners. Her case shows that women can play important support roles even as "stay-at-home" wives if they share their husbands' radical ideology. Or consider the work of former CIA officer Marc Sageman, who profiled about 400 male Islamist terrorists and found that 73 percent of them were married. Presumably, many of those wives support their spouses' line of work.

Malika el-Aroud is a case in point. She is the Belgian-Moroccan widow of the al-Qaeda operative who assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, just hours before 9/11. Aroud traveled to Switzerland after the U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban. Although she had played the traditional wife's role in Afghanistan, segregated from her husband's colleagues and unaware of her husband's impending mission, she took on a much more assertive role back in the West, visiting al-Qaeda prisoners in European jails and running a pro-al-Qaeda Web site. When one of us met with Aroud in her Swiss chalet last year, she did not disguise her violent views, which outlined -- for want of a better term -- a neofeminist militant jihadism. Because of the war in Iraq, she told us, "even us sisters should all rise up and go to the airports and clearly declare we are going to fight." Aroud was convicted last month of terrorism offences in Switzerland. But there are plenty more like her.

bergenpeter@aol.com cruickshank@juris.law.nyu.edu

Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank are fellows

at the New York University Center on Law and Security. Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of "The Osama bin

Laden I Know."