What's special about female suicide terrorism?

Security Studies

Volumn 18, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 681-718

  O'Rourke, Lindsey A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 77951676461     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410903369084     Document Type: Article

References (194)

1. Although other studies have placed the number of female attackers as high as 225, my number is lower because I do not include failed attacks or those in which the death of the perpetrator was not required for the successful completion of the mission.
2. Medea Group Limited, "Female Suicide Bombers-Practical Implications," Strategic Security and Analysis 2, no. 2 (15 August 2007).
3. See Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
4. Mohammed Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
5. See Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and the Strategy for Getting it Right (New York: Times Books, 2005).
6. Martin Kramer, "The Moral Logic of Hizballah," in Origins of Terrorism, ed. Walter Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 131-57.
7. Mark Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
8. Ehud Sprinzak, "Rational Fanatics," Foreign Policy (September/October 2000): 66-73.
9. On the distinction between categories of analysis and categories of practice, see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 1, esp. 15-16.
10. J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
11. J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), chap. 1.
12. Given this, I am attempting to satisfy the three criteria laid out by Whitworth for an IR theory to incorporate gender: (1) enabling discussion of the social construction of meaning, (2) allowing for historical variation, and (3) promoting the discovery of unidentified power relations.
13. Sandra Whitworth, "Gender in the Inter-paradigm Debate," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 18, no. 2 (1989).
14. As a category of practice, gender is important for three reasons. First, terrorist groups do not recruit suicide attackers in a gender-neutral way. The chronological development of FST attests to this: women are typically incorporated into ST campaigns much later than men. This lag in recruitment suggests that organizational dynamics in terrorist groups influence differently each gender's opportunities and incentives to become suicide terrorists. Second, suicide attacks conducted by females are more lethal than those conducted by males. Ironically, this greater lethality derives from the limited, gender-specific roles ascribed to women in the societies from which attackers emerge, maximizing the potential for surprise and concealment. Finally, there are important demographic dissimilarities between male and female attackers. Women attackers are significantly older and more likely to have experienced the killing of a family member (in the context of the conflict) than their male counterparts. Alternatively, as a category of analysis, gender is meaningful for two reasons. First, the societies from which female attackers emerge do have norms that condition the identity and behavior of women differently from those of men. These, in turn, affect the behavior of terrorists' targets. To that extent, gender is a meaningful category for studying these societies and, therefore, the emergence of FST within them. In fact, there is a wide body of work illustrating how the genders are socialized and conditioned differently within societies where ST has emerged. Each of the societies that have generated FST is seen as endorsing gender-specific values regarding the role of women. Such values include a strong emphasis on the familial role of females, a high value placed upon marital fidelity, and a sphere of influence focusing primarily on the household.
15. For general literature on gender in the Middle East, see Pinar Ilkkaracan, ed., Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies (Istanbul: Women for Women's Human Rights, 2000).
16. Nikki R. Keddie, Women in the Middle East: Past and Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
17. Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993).
18. For literature on gender in specific Eastern societies, see Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
19. Suad Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
20. Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics, eds., Women and Power in the Middle East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
21. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
22. Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
23. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
24. I am aware of the methodological critiques raised by Ashworth et al. regarding large-N studies of suicide terrorism, but I do not believe that these critiques are applicable to my study. In Sections 2 and 3, I focus on organizational decisions to employ female attackers, thus my sample is already limited just to ST groups, not all terrorist groups. In Section 4, regarding the individual motives, I try to focus my attention on group behavior in terms of the promotion of gender-specific norms.
25. Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay, "Design, Inference and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 102, no. 2 (April 2008).
26. Information on each attack includes date, number of casualties, location, type of explosive device, number of suicide attackers, terrorist group, and target state. The database also contains demographic information on all known male and female suicide terrorists prior to January 2004, as well as demographic data on all identified female suicide terrorists since that time, including the attacker's name, gender, age, ideological position, marital status, education, and social class. The demographic information available on each attack varies depending upon the journalistic and scholarly coverage of the region in which it takes place. Still, the database contains the date and location of all known attacks, the number of casualties, the type of weapon used, and name of the terrorist group for over 90 percent of all attacks.
27. Portions of Pedahzur's data can be found in Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2005).
28. Additionally, Pedahzur provided the author a database of all Palestinian suicide terrorists.
29. This is important given significant variation in the bomb-making capabilities or terrorist organizations and the availability of desirable targets by conflict. Though I would have liked to include the entire sample of female attackers, I had to limit my analysis in two ways: (1) I was unable to include Iraqi attackers because I have insufficient data on group membership, and (2) I did not include data on Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Somalia, and Uzbekistan because women committed very few attacks in these conflicts compared to men. Had I included these attackers, the findings would have been biased in favor of my argument.
30. Lebanese groups employing women include the SSNP, LLO, Ba'ath Party, and the Lebanese Communist Party. I have not included Hezbollah or Amal because they have not employed female attackers.
31. Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, version 2.0 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1 June 2001), http://gking.harvard.edu.
32. Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg, "Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation," American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (April 2000): 347-61.
33. A negative binomial regression comparing the number killed by attacker controlling for sex, year, and conflict further supports this hypothesis. The coefficient for sex (moving from male to female) is.44, while the coefficient for year is -.06. The Prob > chi2 value is 0.000, the Log likelihood is -679.94554, alpha = 0, and the LR chi2(3) is 34.13. All coefficients were statistically significant.
34. See Edward Wong, "Rebels Dressed as Women Attack Iraqi Police Stations," The New York Times, 5 November 2005.
35. Medea Group Limited, "Female Suicide Bombers."
36. Jessica Stern, "When Bombers are Women," The Washington Post, 18 December 2003.
37. John Reuter, "Chechnya's Suicide Bombers: Desperate, Devout or Deceived," The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (2004): 8.
38. Mia Bloom, "Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bomber," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (November/December 2005).
39. Bloom, "Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bomber."
40. Abbas Aziz, quoted by Stephen Farrell and Mudhafer al-Husani, "Two Bombings Wreak Carnage in Iraqi Capital," The New York Times, 2 February 2008.
41. There is a one year difference for the Tamils, two years for the Lebanese, four years for the Kashmiri, five years for the Pakistani, seven years for the Afghans, and eight years for the Palestinians. Females were involved in the first ST attack for the Chechens, Islamic Jihad Union in Uzbekistan, Al-Qaeda in Somalia, and the PKK. The difference is irrelevant (one month) in Iraq.
42. This suspicion is confirmed by an OLS regression of the number killed by year controlling for conflict, which has a coefficient of -.47 at the 0.000 level of statistical significance.
43. Data from the CPOST, supplemented by Rosemarie Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers (New York: McFarland, 2005).
44. David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1999).
45. The SSNP and PKK each participated in two campaigns, while the LTTE adopted ST in four campaigns.
46. To determine the political and religious ideology of the terrorist organizations, I looked at the history of the conflicts, the propaganda and rhetoric of the terrorist leaders, as well as previous academic studies of each group.
47. Pape, Dying to Win, 211.
48. See Magnus Ranstrop, Hizb'allah in Lebanon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).
49. Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
50. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam, The Tamil Tigers-Armed Struggle for Identity (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994).
51. See Nur Bilge Criss, "The Nature of PKK Terrorism in Turkey," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 8 (1995): 17-37.
52. Christopher Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 155-67.
53. Despite many individual bombers being Muslim, I classify the Chechens as a secular organization based upon previous studies that agree the Chechen movement is best thought of in nationalistic terms with religion playing a secondary role. In her analysis of thirty-four Chechen suicide terrorists, Speckhard found that 82 percent were raised in a secular Muslim environment, while 18 percent were raised in a traditional Muslim background. While there has been an influx in the region of Arab fighters who practice a form of fundamentalist Wahhabbism, there is little evidence suggesting that these views have attracted a large following in Chechnya.
54. See Reuter, "Chechnya's Suicide Bombers".
55. Anne Speckhard and Khapta Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr: Chechen Suicide Terrorism," Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (2005): 452.
56. Reuven Paz, Suicide Terrorist Operations in Russia: An Escalation of the Islamist Struggle (Herzliya, Israel: The Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 20 June 2000).
57. Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism, 64.
58. Lisa Weeden, Ambiguities of Domination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 62-65.
59. Adele Ann, "Women and the Struggle for Tamil Eelam: Freedom Birds of Tamil Eelam," (1990), http://www.eelamweb.com/women (accessed 16 August 2006).
60. Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon, 155.
61. Arnon Regular, "Suicide Training Almost Feminist," Haaretz International, 11 February 2005.
62. Sheik Yassin, quoted in Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2003), 197.
63. Ibid., 30.
64. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 142-66.
65. Mira Tzoreff, "The Palestinian Shahida: National Patriotism, Islamic Feminism or Social Crisis," in Female Suicide Terrorists, ed. Yoram Schweitzer (Tel Aviv: Jaffe Center Publications, 2005).
66. While some religious groups have endorsed women's duty to commit martyrdom for the groups' cause, others have not gone that far. Muslim cleric Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said, "It is true that Islam has not asked women to carry out jihad [holy war], but it permits them to take part if the necessities dictate that women should carry out regular military operations or suicide operations."
67. Sheikh Fadlallah, interview in "Lebanese Muslim Cleric OK's Female Suicide Bombers," Business Recorder, 2 April 2002.
68. Idris became a symbol of bravery and sacrifice and inspired other young women to commit FST acts. Her picture was used on posters throughout the region, political and cultural leaders celebrated her memory, and an Egyptian television program aired her story throughout the Arab world.
69. The editor of Al- Arabi, a weekly Nasserite magazine, wrote, "[S]he is Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ and the Mona Lisa." Victor, Army of Roses, 25-26.
70. One of Fatah's leaders said, "Wafa's martyrdom restored honor to the national role of the Palestinian woman" (ibid., 54).
71. Sheik Yassin, quoted in Bloom, "Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bomber," 7.
72. Victor, Army of Roses, 35.
73. Sheik Yassin, quoted in Bloom, Dying to Kill, 150.
74. Muhammad Daraghmeh, "In Search of Stealthier Suicide Attackers: Islamic Jihad Encourages Women," Associated Press, 31 May 2003.
75. Medea Group Limited, "Female Suicide Bombers," 17.
76. Bloom, "Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bomber."
77. Reporting Central Asia, "Uzbekistan: Affluent Suicide Bombers," RCA no. 278 (London: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 20 April 2004).
78. Salad Duhul, "3 Suicide Bombers Kill 8 in Somalia," Associated Press (30 November 2006).
79. Mujtaba Ali Ahmad, "India's First Female Suicide Bomber Strikes," Associated Press (13 October 2005).
80. Chan, Sue, quoted in CBS News, "FBI Warns of Al-Qaeda Women," 1 April 2003. Interview originally published in the Arabic-language newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat.
81. Umm Osama, quoted in "America to Face Female Suicide Bombers," The Cape Times, 13 March 2003 (emphasis added).
82. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 145.
83. Emile Durkheim's conception of "altruistic" suicide can serve as a heuristic device for understandingthis mechanism. Altruistic suicide occurs when an individual who is highly integrated within a community seeks to commit suicide out of a sense of duty toward that community. Unlike egoistic suicide, the impetus is not that an individual is isolated from the community; quite the contrary, individuals who commit altruistic suicide do so because they are so well integrated within the community that they come to value the community's welfare above their own. In situations in which a suicide is viewed as having value for the community, individuals are willing to sacrifice their own life for the cause. Examples of altruistic suicide include: soldiers who accept "suicide missions" out of the intense bond that they develop with their comrades-in-arms during wartime, certain cultures in which men are required to commit suicide after reaching a certain age or succumbing to sickness, cultures in which women are required to commit suicide after their husband's death, and followers who commit suicide after the death of their chief or leader.
84. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: The Free Press, 1951).
85. Victor, Army of Roses, 235.
86. Mia Bloom, for instance, discusses the possibility that female suicide bombers are compelled to escape the traditional roles for women in their society. See Bloom, Dying to Kill.
87. See also Debra D. Zedalis, "Female Suicide Bombers" (Carlisle, PA: United States Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, June 2004).
88. Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers.
89. Speckhard and Akhmedova conducted an indepth analysis of Chechen female suicide terrorists, determining that personal trauma and the death of a family member often served as individual motivations. Speckhard and Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr." Gunawardena investigated both the individual motives of Tamil female suicide terrorists and the role of gender in the Sri Lankan conflict, arriving to similar conclusions.
90. Arjuna Gunawardena, "Female Black Tigers: A Different Breed of Cat?" in Female Suicide Terrorists.
91. Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova, "Black Widows: The Chechen Female Suicide Terrorists," in Female Suicide Terrorists.
92. I define conventional suicide in opposition to ST; that is, conventional suicide does not involve violence toward others.
93. Shalfic Masalqa, quoted in Victor, Army of Roses, 28.
94. Given the lack of available information, it is possible that I have overlooked other cases. Nevertheless, depression only plays a potential prominent role in one of the biographies (Wafa Idris) for which I have strong biographic information.
95. Pape, Dying to Win, 177.
96. Charles Rich, "Some Differences Between Men and Women Who Commit Suicide," American Journal of Psychiatry 145 (1988): 6.
97. Matthew Nock, "Murder Suicide," The Harvard Medical School Guide to Suicide Assessment and Intervention (San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers, 1999).
98. For examples of arguments against the psychological explanation, see Ariel Merari, "The Readiness to Kill and Die: Suicidal Terrorism in the Middle East," in Origins of Terrorism, 192-211.
99. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
100. Clark McCauley, The Psychology of Terrorism (Washington, DC: Social Science Research Council, 2003).
101. See Pape, Dying to Win.
102. J. Anderson Thomas, Jr., "We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers (and Occasional Sister!): The Dynamics of Suicide Terrorism" (Eighteenth Biennial Congress, International Society of Human Ethology, Detroit, Michigan, 31 July 2006).
103. In their study of Palestinian suicide bombers, Pedahzur and Perlinger show that Palestinian suicide attackers "are peripheral figures in the network who join the ranks ad hoc, from the environment close to the network, for the purpose of carrying out a suicide attack."
104. Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perlinger, "The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks: A Social Network Perspective," Social Forces 84, no. 4 (June 2006): 2000.
105. Although I believe that this is a common occurrence, I do not wish to suggest that it alone can be considered either a necessary or sufficient cause.
106. United Nations Demographic and Social Statistics Branch, The World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics (New York: United Nations, 2005).
107. The one exception to this case is Russia. Still, the cultural values of most of the Russian population vary markedly from those of the Chechen minority. Chechen attackers still live embedded in a traditional society.
108. Lynn Welchmann and Sara Hossain, eds., Honour: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence Against Women (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2005).
109. For the Lebanese, see Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
110. For Kurds, see Pinar Ilkkaracan, "Exploring the Context of Women's Sexuality in Eastern Turkey," in Women and Sexuality in Muslim Countries (Istanbul: Women for Women's Human Rights, 2004), 229-45.
111. For Palestinians, see Samira Haj, "Palestinian Women and Patriarchal Relations," Signs 17, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 761-78.
112. For Tamils, see Bruce Caldwell, Marriage in Sri Lanka: A Century of Change (New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, 1999).
113. For Chechens, see Amjad Jaimoukha, The Chechens: A Handbook (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005).
114. "Making of Muriel the Suicide Bomber," The Sunday Times, 4 December 2005.
115. I believe that including the 2006-08 data would bias my results in favor of my argument given an under-sampling of male demographic data. Biographic data on male attackers appears less often in journalistic coverage of ST attacks during this time period, most likely due to journalistic fatigue as the number of ST attacks increased dramatically in Iraq.
116. A second complementary explanation for this discrepancy in ages may be that older unmarried women have greater opportunities for committing suicide attacks compared to younger or married women because they have greater freedom to act without having to acquire familial approval.
117. Iraqis have been excluded because the only confirmed age of a successful female suicide terrorist is thirty-eight. Moreover, she participated in a joint attack with her husband.
118. State Institute of Statistics, 2002 Marriage, Divorce, Suicide, Death Statistics (Ankara: Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry, 2002).
119. Speckhard and Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr," 478.
120. "Population Marital Status," All Russian Population Census (Moscow: Statistika Rossii, 2002).
121. Only two of the female suicide terrorists from these groups were known to be married at the time they conducted the attack.
122. See U.S. Agency for International Development, Near East Lebanon (Washington, DC: Office of Development Information and Utilization, 1981).
123. Palestinian National Authority, Health Status in Palestine (Ramallah: Ministry of Health, 2003).
124. Caldwell, Marriage in Sri Lanka, 108-10.
125. Gunawardena found no evidence in her survey of female LTTE attackers that any of the women were married at the time of their attacks. Gunawardena, "Female Black Tigers," in Female Suicide Terrorists. In the case of the Sri Lankans, there is the possibility for reverse causality given the reports that the LTTE prohibits its members from marrying. Female LTTE members may face a choice between continuing their support for the group or renouncing their membership in order to look for a husband.
126. Christopher Reuter, My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 160.
127. Victor, Army of Roses, 112.
128. Katherine VanderKaay, "Girls Interrupted: The Making of Female Palestinian Suicide Bombers," in Terror in the Holy Land: Inside the Anguish of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, ed. Judy Kuriansky (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 18.
129. Lisa Weeden, Ambiguities of Domination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
130. Would-be female suicide terrorists who were caught before they could successfully conduct their attack are not part of the dataset used in this paper. Nevertheless, and since we have reason to assume that their motivations were similar to those of successful female suicide attackers, I use their cases to shed light on the causal logic I advance.
131. Anne Marie Oliver, "Brides of Paradise," Salon.com (20 July 2006).
132. Yoram Schweitzer, "Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers: Reality vs. Myth," in Female Suicide Terrorists, 32.
133. Tzoreff, "The Palestinian Shahida," in Female Suicide Terrorists, 21.
134. Pape, Dying to Win, 212.
135. I am using the CPOST database for the relevant time period. Using a contingency table, this finding is statistically significant at the P <.0.0001 level with a Chi-Square score of 69.4.
136. Abu al-Walid al-Ghamidi, quoted in "Commander Says Chechnya War to Spread to Rest of Russia," BBC Monitoring International Reports, 19 November 2003.
137. Speckhard and Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr," 455.
138. Charlene Miall, "The Stigma of Involuntary Childlessness," Social Problems 33, no 4. (1986): 268-82.
139. See Speckhard and Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr," 469.
140. Victor, Army of Roses, 19-54.
141. Mangalika Silva, "Co-Ordinator Women for Peace".
142. quoted in Ana Cutter, "Tamil Tigresses, Hindu Martyrs," Journal of International Affairs (1998).
143. Welchmann and Hossain, Honour: Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women, 273.
144. See Faye Linda Wachs, "The Relevance of Honor in the Contemporary World: Honor and Power," Pedagogy, Culture and Society 13, no. 1 (March 2005).
145. L. Abu Odeh, "Crimes of Honour and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies," in Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies.
146. Patricia Searles and Ronald Berger, eds., Rape and Society: Readings on the Problem of Sexual Assault (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
147. There are only two cases where enough biographical information is available to look into this question. These are Dhanu, who is discussed in the case studies below and Hiba Daraghmeh, who committed her attack five years after she was raped. Family members reported that, during the intervening period, Hiba became more religious and adhered closely to the traditional norms for women in her society.
148. Victor, Army of Roses, 289-292.
149. See K.M. De Silva, Conflict and Violence in South Asia (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2000), 237.
150. World Organisation Against Torture, statement to UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 50th Session, Geneva, Switzerland, August 1998.
151. See Jan Goodwin, "When the Suicide Bomber is a Woman," Marie Claire (August 2007).
152. Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers, 93-95.
153. Miranda Alison, "Cogs in the Wheel: Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam," Civil Wars 6, no.4 (Winter 2003): 43.
154. Bloom, Dying to Kill, 164.
155. Alisa Stack-O'Connor, "Lions, Tigers, and Freedom Birds: How and Why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Employs Women," Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (2007): 55.
156. On rapes perpetrated by Russian forces, see, for example, Human Rights Watch, "No Happiness Remains: Civilian Killings, Pillage, and Rape in Alkhan-Yurt, Chechnya," A Human Rights Watch Short Report 12, no. 5 (2000): 26-27, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6a86d8.html (accessed 10 September 2009).
157. Also, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, recounted stories of "mass killings, summary executions, rape, torture and pillage" from her 2000 trip to Chechnya.
158. Yu K Nikolaev, Chechnya Revisited (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003), 11.
159. On Chechen rebels coercing women to commit attacks through rape, see Vic Groskop, "Chechnya's Deadly Black Widows," New Statesmen 133, no. 4704 (2004): 132 (2).
160. Speckhard finds no evidence of this in her study of Chechen female bombers.
161. Speckhard and Ahkmedova, "The Making of a Martyr," 471.
162. See Turkey's Shame: Sexual Violence Without Redress-the Plight of Kurdish Women-Trial Observation Report (London: Kurdish Human Rights Project, 2003).
163. Rachel Denber, "Case of Nuriye Kesbir, Letter to Dutch Ministry of Justice," Human Rights Watch, 24 May 2004.
164. See Jennifer Lynn Green, "Collective Rape: A Cross-National Study of the Incidence and Perpetrators of Mass Political Sexual Violence, 1980-2003" (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2006), http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?accnum=osu1153496251.
165. Megan Bastick, Karin Grimm, and Rahel Kunz, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts: Global Overview and Implications for the Security Sector (Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2007).
166. Dara Kay Cohen, "The Causes of Sexual Violence by Insurgents During Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980-1999)," by request at http://www.stanford.edu/~dkcohen/research.html, (2008).
167. Christopher Dickey, "Young Lebanese Seek New Martyrdom," TheWashington Post, 12 May 1985.
168. Sana Mhaydali's SSNP martyrdom video. I thank Sevag Kechichian for this translation.
169. Edward Walsh, "From Suicide Recruit to Captive of Israel," The Washington Post, 18 June 1985.
170. Roland Flamini, "Analysis: Women 'Martyrs' for the Cause," United Press International, 3 September 2004.
171. Weeden, Ambiguities of Domination, 62.
172. Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers, 93-95.
173. She frequently went shopping, went to the cinema six times during the last twenty days of her life.
174. Pape, Dying to Win, 226-30.
175. Victor, Army of Roses 19-54. Idris's friends recounted that she would lie about her age, suggesting that being unmarried at her age was a source of embarrassment.
176. (ibid., 3).
177. Ibid., 41.
178. Barbara Victor, "Equality in Death," The Observer, 25 April 2004.
179. Annette Langer, "Schwarze Witwen" Spiegel Online, (March 07, 2005).
180. Gasujewa assassinated Gadschijew in June 2000. Moments before she detonated her explosives, she asked him, "Do you still know me?" Mainat Abduljewa, "Why They Murder: About the Chechen Terrorism," Grosny, 3 September 2004.
181. Skaine, Female Suicide Bombers, 114.
182. "Journey of a Belgian female 'Bomber,"' BBC News, 12 December 2005.
183. Degauque donned a head-to-tow chador, prevented her father from drinking alcohol, and refused to eat in the presence of men.
184. Craig Smith, "Raised as Catholic in Belgium, She Died as a Muslim Bomber," The New York Times, 6 December 2005.
185. In addition to these empirical findings, my argument has one main theoretical contribution to offer to the specific literature on FST: it connects this literature to the broader debate on the causes of ST in general. Thus far, studies of FST have focused entirely on the individual motivations of attackers. This has prevented scholarship on the subject from understanding the broader strategic and organizational dynamics at play in FST. As I have demonstrated, strategic considerations are behind terrorist groups' endorsement of FST. Similarly, organizational dynamics-specifically, competition between religious and secular groups for the support of the same population-are behind the spread of FST across and within conflicts. The argument and evidence presented above enables us to understand the phenomenon of FST in a comprehensive way, encompassing its strategic, organizational, and individual aspects. This also has consequences for the literature on ST more generally. First, I show how strategy leads to changes in ideology. Terrorist groups' willingness to achieve strategic goals leads these groups to adapt their organizations and discourse in order to maximize their chances of success. As part of this process of strategic adaptation, terrorist groups-secular ones first, then also religious ones-have included FST into their arsenal of weapons. Second, I illustrate the way in which ideological discourse is used as an interface between group strategy and individual motives. In particular, rhetoric about the role of each gender has been transformed in both secular and religious groups as a consequence of the superior effectiveness of FST, which lead both groups to resort to it. This displays the malleability of discourse, which contrasts with the fixity of strategic goals.
186. For instance, threats to deploy female bombers have been made by Al-Aqsa, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and an Iranian group named Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement.
187. See Christopher Dickey, "The Women of Al-Qaeda," Newsweek, 12 December 2005.
188. Matthew Kalman, "The Suicide Sisters," Daily Mail, 22 May 2007.
189. Brian Murphy, "Iranians Pledge to Become Suicide Bombers," Associated Press, 25 May 2006.
190. UPI, "Palestinian Women Threaten Suicide Attacks," 26 April 2007.
191. Army Capt. Mike Starz, "Soldiers Help Create 'Daughters of Iraq' Program," American Forces Press Service, (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 18 April 2008).
192. "U.S. Trains Iraqi Women to find Female Suicide Bombers," CNN, 24 June 2008.
193. On occupation as a root motivation for suicide terrorism, see Pape, Dying to Win.
194. Riyad abu Mohammed, quoted in Alexandra Zavis, "Daughters of Iraq: Women Take on a Security Role," The Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2008.