Last week four more Iraqi suicide bombers struck, leaving the mainstream media dumbfounded. Anchors from Atlanta to New York asked pundits: "What do you make of this?" "What could the motivation be?" "Who put them up to it?"
After five years of a war filled with attacks of this nature, you wouldn't expect the media to be so shocked and awed, but there was one critical factor that had the anchors stumbling: all four suicide bombers were female.
Female suicide bombers are, in fact, not a new phenomenon. According to Debra D. Zedalis, author of Female Suicide Bombers, the first known attack by a woman is traced back to 1985, when 16-year-old Khyadali Sana drove a truck into an Israeli Defense Force Convoy, killing two soldiers. Since then women from Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Palestine, Turkey, and Israel (among others) have participated in suicide bombings. In fact, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka use women between 30 and 40 percent of the time when carrying out such attacks.
Starting in 2003, Iraq has experienced over 50 suicide bombings carried out by women, 20 of them just in the last year. It is no longer justifiable for the media to act aghast when another woman turns up with blood on her hands.
How could a woman do this? As doctoral student Lindesy O'Rourke argued in her New York Times op-ed last weekend, women appear to have the same motivations as their male counterparts -- as O'Rourke puts it, "a deep loyalty to their communities combined with a variety of personal grievances against enemy forces." Women, like men, have the capacity for ideological extremism and retaliatory violence.
A more important question is, what conditions make suicide bombing a viable option for human beings -- be they men or women? And, further, what is our role, as Americans, in perpetuating these conditions?
The majority of suicide attackers, of either gender, are young. CNN reports that the U.S. military has a 14-year-old would be suicide bomber in custody, indeed a woman. Averagely, they are in their early 20s, an age known for exploration and ideation.
These young people get pulled into nationalistic or ethnically-based organizations (no woman, to date, has been involved in an independent suicide attack) that promise them a way to make their lives meaningful. Many, though not all, of them come from economically depressed families, towns and cities ravaged by long and bloody war, and relationships that have left them psychologically vulnerable.
In one of the best investigations of female suicide bombers to date, journalist Jan Goodwin secured an interview with Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) failed suicide bomber Menake, currently awaiting sentencing in Sri Lankan prison. Menake's alcoholic, abusive father killed her mother when she was just three years old and brutally raped her at the age of seven. An excerpt from that interview, which appeared in Marie Claire magazine:
Menake wrote to the LTTE secretariat. "I'm willing to become a Black Tiger," she wrote. "It would be an honor. Please let me have your permission to join."
"Do you understand you will become a human bomb?" Menake was asked by the Black Tiger leaders in her interview.
"I told them that I did," she says. "I felt I had no other choice." The LTTE calls its suicide missions thatkodai, Tamil for "gift of self." It made her feel, Menake says, that her life still had a purpose.
For kids from Iraq, Sri Lanka, and so many other countries with broken education systems and few opportunities to create lasting meaning, being a martyr is a prefab identity, a way out of the daily squalor and emotional turmoil, most simply, a way to feel some agency.
Most often, the media paints female suicide bombers as coerced, as if they couldn't possibly choose this route; for example, early speculation that two female suicide bombers who struck last February had Down's Syndrome were proven false. Other media has focused entirely on the misogynistic culture that these women suffer in, rarely looking at the oppression brought on by America's occupation.
As an anonymous blogger at Feminist Philosophers writes:
"To see her as entirely coerced, then, seems to make invisible the quite significant agency that she must have exercised to undertake a terror bombing attack. Perhaps it's simply easier not to acknowledge that women might strongly hold extremist beliefs, and be willing to engage in terrorist action..."
It is easier not to acknowledge women's agency, because then we would have to acknowledge the depth of desperation that both women and men feel in these war ravaged countries, and by extension, our own role in contributing to that desperation. When men are violent, we chalk it up to human nature and soon forget, but when women strike blows, it shakes us awake. Suddenly the extent of destruction, the intensity of desperation, the absence of hope, is unmistakable. We are forced to reckon with the blood-thirsty opposition that we have just made thirstier through our misguided democracy projects.
O'Rourke reports that "95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces." Our media, the public at large, is so uncomfortable with the idea of female suicide bombers because it awakens some sense of responsibility within ourselves. When those we have stereotyped as tender, introspective, sensitive resort to reckless violence and destruction, we are forced to put a face on the violence. Suddenly, dead Iraqis lying in the street are not just casualties, their murderers are not just terrorists, but flesh-and-blood women -- your little sister, your niece, your daughter.
And of course once these desperate men and women have been humanized, the next logical question is one we're afraid to face: what is our responsibility in all of this?
Patrick Henry's cry of defiance is supposed to define America but hey I've got news for you. Other people can think that way too, and the freedom they want is freedom from you.
And hey, isn't it rather patronising to feel surprise that a mere woman could feel that way too?
As with the Kamikaze and the defenders of the Alamo, suicide bombers are making the point that they consider some things more important than even their own lives. You might not agree with what they think those things are, but labeling them nutters or delusional is only a way of avoiding facing the realisation that there's nothing more important to you than your own life.
And she's right. Why ask a question about one's motivation, receive the answer from that person, only to dismiss it and offer a more alluring theory? Oh, that's right (doctoral student).
Here's how a woman, or a man, can, and will continue to do this:
"Do you understand you will become a human bomb?" Menake was asked by the Black Tiger leaders in her interview.
"I told them that I did," she says. "I felt I had no other choice." The LTTE calls its suicide missions thatkodai, Tamil for "gift of self." It made her feel, Menake says, that her life still had a purpose."
To ensure that their life has a purpose. Some become journalists, seeking to inform and foster debate. This is helpful, even necessary in a free society. Doing this job gives her the sense that her life has purpose. Some, on the other extreme, blow up abortion clinics, or get into a car and drive into a crow of Israelis. In every case, the motivation is to feel as if one's life has purpose.
I work with Ms. O'Rourke at CPOST (Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism). Every day I watch last-will videos or research attacks, and although I'm not in the business of analysis as much as data collection, it becomes difficult not to come to certain conclusions. Statements about revenge cite specific individuals killed in conflict. Statements about belonging to a cause are not exclusively gendered. An occupying force is an occupying force. Certainly, poverty, lack of education, and other socio-economic factors are contributors. We don't need to feel mushy or guilty, but it is important to understand their motivations. And if the recent spate of female bombers makes us start to examine these motivations, then so be it.
I recommend Robert Pape's text - "Dying to Win."
(Also, my moniker is totally fair game for ridicule. This is what happens when you have too much wine before making an account, boys and girls.)
Although I do object to some of the navel-gazing found in Martin's article, the more that we can talk about suicide bombers in general, the more we understand their motivations. I'm not advocating any action here, but the fact of the matter is that withdrawal from an area effectively eliminates the number of volunteers for these kinds of operations - the well dries up. After the 1983 bombings of the US and French bases in Lebanon, the US, France, and Israel ultimately pulled out and the suicide bombings stopped. (Reagan devoted a chapter to these events in his memoir.) No motivation, no suicide attacks - because the sovereignty of the region is returned. And no, the bombers didn't "follow them back."
Typical liberal self hate. People have been killing themselves to make a point from the beginning of time and [here's a shocker] the United States had nothing to do with it. The fact that someone is so twisted that they will take innocent lives as well as their own is more a reflection on them than on the system in which they reside. Why? Because it is a waste of time and life and they are too stupid to know it. Kamakazis did it for Japan, buddhist monks in Viet Nam, and now islamic extremists.
My evidence that there is an alternative to despotism other than killing others? Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama.
Why is it that the people who were shooting at me are innocent whereas I am a murderer and therefore a war criminal for shooting back? I never started a firefight or planted a bomb on the side of the road.
I didn't join because I wanted to go to war. I didn't go to Iraq because I especially believed in the cause (I do but that is beside the point) I enlisted out of a desire to serve/protect my country. I fight in any war the President directs for whatever reason he directs and I don't ask questions because that is how this service is performed. A few in the military oppose this war as military people have opposed every war they were in but we fight because we pledged that we would defend this country even at the expense of our life. Sure a few are cowards who run to Canada but we can't all be winners.
Granted I was not fighting on US soil and at the time I was fighting for the Marine next to me and not at all for my own freedom but rather for yours.
You can disagree with the use of the military but unless you're prepared to defend this country yourself your critizisms ring hollow.
Desperation and lack of meaning in their lives as part of a devastated community I can imagine can lead to "self offering". That these things do not happen in USA normally is because life is too sweet for many people, in fact, a majority. If medicare gets screwed up and social security is hijacked, it can happen here. Senior citizen strapping himself or herself with plastics can walk into govt. buildings and blow themselves up for the good of the country. Or workers who lost their homes, with every new job, their pay is halved, could not feed the family could resort to this kind of violence. Only the other day a fellow in TN unemployed, conservative blaming liberals for the ills of society went on a rampage shooting at a congregation in a church. In fact he was hoping to be shot dead but that did not happen. In his truck they found the books written by prophets like Sean Hannity, O'Reilly etc. So don't be smug that this is a Muslim problem, Tamil problem, Palestinian problem. This would be a problem in any place where there is misery and destitution and idealistic young or even old people who want to die for a cause and see us as the root for their hopelessness. As the poet said;" Don't ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
War is a rich man's terror. Terror is a poor man's war.
My mother was such a person.
V. C.