Female suicide bomber - Women

May 19, 2012


		1 Introduction 2 Palestinian bombers 3 List of female suicide bombers by country 4 External link 5 Further reading

Women's Health Women

Female suicide bomber

Wikipedia

Though the majority of suicide bombing|suicide bombers were and are male, female suicide bombers have carried out a number of attacks since 1985.

The first suicide attack by a woman was carried on in Lebanon on April 9, 1985. Sanaa Mouhaydly, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), detonated an explosive-laden vehicle, which killed two Israel Defense Forces|IDF soldiers and injured two more. Since then, female suicide bombers have been employed in several conflicts, by a variety of organizations, against both military and civilian targets:

Women of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, have perpetrated 30–40% of the organization's suicide bombings, which number nearly 200. Thenmuli Rajaratnam (also known as Dhanu), who assassinated Prime Minister of India|Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, is the best-known of these bombers.

The Chechen people|Chechen Black Widows have attacked Russian troops in Chechnya and Russian civilians elsewhere, e.g. in the Moscow theater hostage crisis.

During the Lebanese Civil War, female SSNP members bombed Israeli troops, militias such as the South Lebanon Army, and Lebanese civilians.

In the Al-Aqsa Intifada, women of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas have bombed Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Members of the Iraqi insurgency have set off suicide bombs.

Women of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) have carried out suicide bombings primarily against Turkish Armed Forces, in some cases strapping explosives to their abdomen in order to simulate pregnancy.

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Palestinian bombers

Some argue that the increasing prevalence of female suicide bombers in the Intifada is a sign of the rising status of women in Arab culture. Some argue that the desire to become a martyr stems from the marginalization of women in Arab society.

Though Islam forbids women (and men) to commit suicide bombings, militant organizations (including fundamentalist Muslim ones) have used women to carry out suicide bombings because they draw less suspicion than men and go through less rigorous security checks. For example: while a man can be checked to see if he's carrying an explosive belt by simply lifting his shirt, ordering a woman to do so contradicts Jewish norms of modesty and will cause outrage among conservative Muslims. Israeli security procedures practice is that a suspected woman is to be checked by a female soldier in a screened off area.

On the same day Darine Abu Aisha committed a suicide bombing, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the former religous leader of Islamist militant group Hamas, issued a fatwa, or religous rule, that gave permission to women to participate in suicide attacks as well as listing the rewards in "Paradise" that these female martyrs would recieve apon their deaths. He also promised Hamas will send many female suicide bombers in order to strike Israelis.

Reactions to this in the Islamic world were ambivalent. While many hailed the female suicide bomber and urged full involvement of all in Jihad, some criticized the cruelty of tearing mothers from their children and sending them to explode themselves. One Lebanon|Lebanese reporter mocked Hamas's "manhood" and suggested that Hamas male militants' inability to penetrate Israeli defenses forced Hamas to use women, which is derogatory to Hamas according to traditional Arab values.

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List of female suicide bombers by country

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India

Thenmuli Rajaratnam, 21 May 1991 Suspected Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam|LTTE member, killed former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi, herself and 16 others at an election rally near Chennai|Madras.

Israel and Palestine

Wafa Idris, 27 January 2002

Darine Abu Aisha, 27 February 2002

Ayat al-Akhras, 30 March 2002

Andalib Suleiman, 25 April 2002

Hiba Daraghmeh, 19 May 2003

Hanadi Jaradat, 24 October 2003. (see Maxim restaurant suicide bombing)

Reem El-Reyashi, 14 January 2004 22 years of age, mother of a 3 year old son and a year old daughter.

Zeybab Ali Issa Abu-Salam, 22 September, 2004, 18 years of age

Iraq

Nour Qaddour al-Shammari and Wadad Jamil Jassem, April 3, 2003

one woman, September 28, 2005

Muriel Degauque, a Belgium|Belgian woman who blew herself up on November 9, 2005.

Jordan

Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, with her husband but her belt failed to detonate - captured by Jordanian authorities, November 9, 2005

Russia

Lidiya Khaldykhoroyeva, June 5, 2003

Zulikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva and (unknown), 5 July 2003

1 woman, December 5, 2003

Khedizha Magomadova, December 9, 2003

1 woman, February 6, 2004

Satsita Dzhebirkhanova and Amanta Nagayeva, August 24, 2004 (see Russian airplane bombings of August 2004)

Roza Nagayeva, August 31, 2004

Chechnya

Hawa Barayev, 9 June 2000

1 woman, 29 April 2001

2 women, May 12, 2003

Shakhidat Baimuradova, 14 May 2003

1 woman, June 20, 2003

Sri Lanka

The Tamil Tigers have carried out more suicide bombings than any other organization, and in doing so have employed more women—an estimated 30–40% of their bombers have been female.

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External link

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/09/10/international/0910BOMBERSch.gif Women Armed for Terror - list of female suicide-bombers.

http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=470 Messengers of Death. Female Suicide Bombers (February 12, 2003) and http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=508 An Update (March 7, 2004) by Clara Beyler at ICT

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