Suicide bombers (f.)
Aug 11th, 2008 by MESH
From Michael Horowitz
Lindsey O’Rourke’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb,” is an interesting attempt to describe some of the issues surrounding the use of female suicide bombers in Iraq and elsewhere. As she points out, many of the groups that have utilized suicide terrorism have employed female suicide bombers. As such, her attempt to study the issue seriously is welcome and could significantly contribute to scholarship in this area.
Unfortunately, her piece contains a few misconceptions about suicide terrorism and the existing literature that deserve clarification. As someone also interested in questions surrounding suicide terrorism, I offer these comments in the spirit of helping build our knowledge in that area.
First, she states that “we are told” female suicide bombers are driven by “despair, mental illness, religiously mandated subordination to men, frustration with sexual inequality and a host of other factors related specifically to their gender.” At least in the literature on suicide terrorism, this does not seem to be the case. Robert Pape‘s work on suicide terrorism, which she approvingly cites, does not come from this perspective. Neither does work by Mia Bloom, Bruce Hoffman, Assaf Moghadam, Ami Pedahzur, Marc Sageman, and others. So, while I agree with her argument that “feminine” motivations do not seem to be driving female suicide bombers and female suicide bombers have similar motivations to men, most other scholars of suicide terrorism agree as well.
Second, it is unclear whether her goal is to de-emphasize the “female” element of female suicide bombers or to argue they do deserve independent consideration. As many argue, she states that “there is simply no one demographic profile for female attackers,” something true for male attackers as well. If there is no demographic profile and the motivations of female suicide bombers are similar to male suicide bombers, why do they deserve study as a separate category? Her answer is that female suicide bombers are used more frequently for a specific type of missions—assassinations—because they have an easier time getting close to hard targets due to cultural and societal norms about treating and handling women. This is a very interesting and an important finding, if true, for it points out a shortcoming in security screening procedures around the globe. However, that means we should not necessarily study female suicide bombers as an independent category, but as part of the larger category of suicide bombings designed to assassinate leaders.
Third, her focus on occupation as the cause of suicide terrorism is misplaced. Whether the feeling of occupation is accurate or not in the eyes of the West, perceptions of occupation likely play a powerful role in influencing the propensity for groups to engage in violent resistance. However, occupation is less likely to impact the choice of a particular tactic within the decision to engage in violent resistance. While Pape has shown that many of the groups that adopt suicide terrorism perceive themselves as occupied, many other groups that perceive themselves as occupied have not chosen to adopt suicide terrorism.
In fact, it makes more sense to think about suicide terrorism as a special case of a military innovation, one strongly influenced by diffusion dynamics. The extensive direct and indirect linkages between groups that have adopted suicide terrorism suggest that the probability of suicide terrorism is not an entirely independent choice, but one influenced by the knowledge and skills that groups gain from direct and vicarious learning. Moreover, we have to study both those groups and people that adopt suicide tactics and those that do not in order to gain the full picture. As Scott Ashworth et al. recently pointed out in the American Political Science Review, studying just the universe of suicide terror groups or female suicide attackers selects on the dependent variable, making it hard to draw causal inferences from whatever correlations might exist. Things that are similar within the universe of suicide terror groups or the universe of female attackers might also be true of non-adopters as well, meaning those similarities do not actually predict behavior.
A more fruitful way to study the issue is to compare the groups that have adopted suicide terrorism and group members that have become suicide bombers with those that have not. Comparing adopters like Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Tamil Tigers with non-adopters like the Provisional IRA and ETA, the Basque terrorist group, reveals the critical importance of organizational dynamics in driving adoption or non-adoption. Since, as O’Rourke points out, demographic profiling of potential suicide attackers does not seem promising, it makes more sense to evaluate group characteristics and focus on what makes adoption more or less likely.
Regardless of potential issues with her academic analysis, however, her policy prescription to improve screening of women at “key security checkpoints” is sensible. While I disagree that “occupation” is a primary cause of suicide attacks—as described above, it influences the probability that a group will adopt terrorism, not the choice of suicide tactics—hopefully ideas like the “Daughters of Iraq” can be more than a stopgap in the effort to decrease the number of suicide attacks against American and Iraqi forces, as well as ordinary Iraqis. I applaud O’Rourke’s attention to this important topic, and hope to see more analysis of this kind in the future.
Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.
5 Responses to “Suicide bombers (f.)”
I have to agree with many of Michael Horowitz’s assertions. I read the New York Times op-ed piece by Lindsey O’Rourke with great interest and felt that it emphasized foreign occupation at the expense of other competing and possibly complementary explanations. Asserting that there have been more secular attacks than religious attacks is only factually correct if we stop counting the events at the start of the Iraq war (as Robert Pape’s APSR article did).
According to my own research (for a forthcoming book, Bombshell: Women and Terror), the best predictors of women’s involvement in terrorist organizations continue to be association and especially relation to a male insurgent. Women’s motivation to carry out a suicide attack increases exponentially if the male has been killed. This crosscuts radical Islamic extremist groups in addition to the secular organizations.
During my field work in Sri Lanka, most of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) women considered joining the organization as a family affair. Significantly, during my field research in Indonesia last year, I discovered that Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) uses its women to cement the linkages between different cells of the organization. This use of strategic marriage, akin to the European royal marriages of the 14th century that cemented ties between England and France or Spain and England, functions to keep the cell leaders within the group’s orbit and control.
So in contrast to the ways in which we assume women and marriage moderate extremists (for example, when Yassir Arafat tried to marry off as many members of the Black September Organization after 1975 to de-mobilize them), women and marriage within the radical Islamic extremist organizations might have the reverse effect.
Lindsey O’Rourke is likely correct that the women may alternate their claims of motivation over time. According to Yoram Schweitzer’s interviews with failed female suicide bombers at Hasharon prison in Israel, their initial interviews reveal emotional reasons for their act. After spending time with the other prisoners in the jail (who are organized by political affiliation), they tend to parrot classic political propaganda. Schweitzer asserts that the women are in fact more motivated by the personal than the political. This might explain the motives for some of the women, but not someone like Ahlam Tammimi who was clearly motivated by political and not personal reasons.
The truth is likely a combination of motivations, which will include personal and political reasons—including occupation. If we consider suicide terrorism like any crime, we require both motive and opportunity to understand the event. Occupation may very well provide the opportunity (access to American or foreign troops) but the motive remains much more complex.
O’Rourke, like Pape, focuses on foreign occupation when, in fact, this is likely a necessary though insufficient condition. We might consider what it is specifically about occupation that causes intense levels of humiliation, outrage, and violent mobilization. But without the emotional content, and the religious justification, we would not see the literal explosion of suicide terrorism across the Islamic world.
Women, like men are motivated by a combination of reasons. The organizations now know that female operatives are more successful and less likely to be searched—and if women are invasively searched, this will only add to the population’s anger and resentment. From the standpoint of the terrorist organizations, using women is a win-win strategy. Horowitz is correct in seeing suicide terrorism, especially by women, as a tactical adaptive innovation we will likely see much more of in the future.
Mia Bloom is assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, Athens.
I want to thank my good friend Mike Horowitz for weighing in with his considered thoughts on suicide bombing. On the one hand, “sacrificial warfare” is as timeless as war itself—and we ourselves tend to praise those who lay down their lives so that others might live. (How many medals of honor, for example, have been given to men who have thrown themselves on grenades in order to save the lives of their fellow soldiers?) But suicide bombing as an offensive tactic is a relatively new phenomenon and has been adopted unevenly. Why do some guerrilla and terror groups adopt suicide tactics while others do not?
A few days ago, I was walking though the southern suburbs of Beirut and saw several large tributes to the late Imad Mugniyeh—most notorious in the United States for his role in the suicide attack that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in 1983. But how did suicide tactics then spread from Lebanon? And why has Hezbollah apparently ceased to employ suicide tactics? Like Mike, I believe both rationalist and cultural explanations hold explanatory promise—functionalist explanations alone only get us so far. We must also study the internal dynamics of the groups which adopt suicide as a tactic. Regardless, much more research is needed in this field. Some of the best work thus far has been done by Mike and Erin Simpson, though, and like many others, I’ll continue to follow their research closely.
Andrew Exum is a member of MESH.
Thank you very much for your excellent comments on my New York Times op-ed, “Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb,” and the opportunity to respond to them.
Michael Horowitz wrote:
As indicated in the opening paragraph of my op-ed, I focused discussion on the media’s portrayal of female attackers and the ‘popular misconceptions’ that derived from it. In any case, the belief that women attackers are driven by uniquely feminine motivations is also common within the burgeoning academic literature on the topic. For instance, Mia Bloom has written, “When men conduct suicide missions, they are motivated by religious or nationalist fanaticism, whereas women appear more often motivated by very personal reasons.” (Dying to Kill, p. 145.)
Horowitz also wrote:
I do not believe that the greater propensity of female attackers to commit suicide assassination attacks is the only justification to study them as a category of analysis. Rather I wrote, “Investigating the dynamics governing female attackers not only helps to correct common misperceptions but also reveals important characteristics about suicide terrorism in general.” Moreover, although my research to date has come to the opposite conclusion, I believe it is important to investigate the possibility that women and men are driven by fundamentally dissimilar individual motivations. Finally, differences in the adoption of female attackers by group help to illuminate interesting patterns regarding organizational composition, ideology, strategy, the malleability of discourse, recruitment techniques, tactical deployment and counter-terrorism measures. I discussed this briefly in the op-ed and will expand upon these points in future research.
Horowitz again:
I applaud the effort to bring multiple methodological approaches to the study of suicide terrorism and acknowledge the great difficulties for determining causal influence when sampling on the dependent variable. Four brief points on this comment:
• First, I did not argue that occupation alone was either a necessary or sufficient condition to bring about female suicide terrorism.
• Second, my research focuses upon the substantial variations in decisions to employ women attackers amongst suicide terrorist groups, rather than the organizations’ decisions to adopt suicide attacks in the first place.
• Third, I strongly agree that it makes “sense to think about suicide terrorism as a special case of a military innovation, one strongly influenced by diffusion dynamics.” In fact, one of the key points that I discussed was the learning process that religious organizations underwent regarding female attackers after learning of women’s strategic desirability from secular groups.
• Fourth, researchers must also bear in mind the difficulties of this alternative approach. Given the abundance of radical political organizations, hate groups, militant separatist movements, terrorist groups, ethnic conflicts and wars, where should scholars draw the line when deciding the appropriate universe of cases? By only selecting cases such as the Provisional IRA and ETA for comparison, researchers can smuggle in assumptions regarding the underlying political circumstances that inspire suicide terrorism. While this challenge may not be insurmountable, it too raises great hurdles for establishing causality.
Lindsey O’Rourke is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago.
Lindsey O’Rourke’s recent New York Times op-ed was a worthy contribution to our discussion of female suicide bombers, and the conversation conducted in this thread has built nicely upon O’Rourke’s work. I offer the observations below (based on my research) in the hopes of further texturing this debate.
From the vantage point of summer 2008, it seems safe to state that we cannot attribute suicide terrorism to any one factor. Ethno-cultural nationalism; religious fanaticism; group dynamics and leadership style; occupation—all can play a part in an organization’s decision to dispatch suicide bombers and in an individual’s decision to carry out an attack. Thus, we see that while suicide attacks are used in struggles against occupying forces, they are also frequently used in inter-ethnic conflict, e.g. the struggle in Pakistan. Indeed, in Iraq, inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian suicide attacks have almost overshadowed those directed at the foreign occupation forces. In order to plumb the true depths of this increasingly widespread phenomenon, then, it must be explored through as many of the angles involved as possible.
We are often moved to focus primarily on the personal considerations that induce humans to abrogate their survival instinct in such murderous fashion. It is perhaps best, though, to direct most of our attention towards the considerations that lead organizations to deploy suicide bombers. This, because suicide bombers are, mostly, pawns, who rarely have a voice in their organization’s higher echelons, or in its decision-making process. Organizational factors also appear to be somewhat more predictive than the other factors involved in these decisions. Indirect diffusion unquestionably does impact upon an organization’s decision to incorporate suicide terrorism into its arsenal. Indeed, we might imagine that, had suicide terrorism been widely in use during the 60’s and 70’s, this MO might have become more widespread. In many instances, however, strong ties to a group that aggressively espouses suicide terrorism can influence the decision to adopt this tactic to a much greater degree. To illustrate this point, consider that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Afghani Taliban did not employ this tactic until AQ central persuaded them to do so.
Female suicide bombers have even less control over their deployment than their male counterparts. Thus, when studying female suicide bombings, it is even more important to resist the impulse to center on the personal motivations driving these women, and to explore the organizational considerations that occasioned their deployment. Such calculations might include a need to overcome conditions that make it difficult or impossible to deploy male bombers. Resource allocation can also factor into these decisions: in the ultra-conservative patriarchal societies in which these dramas often play out, the idea of women receiving personal training and attention from men is borderline-taboo. Accordingly, it is difficult for women in these societies to acquire the training necessary to become combat-effective. Suicide bombings, then, which require only the easily-acquired abilities to mask one’s intent and detonate one’s payload, often become the only road open to women who’ve decided to contribute actively to the fighting. As such, it can seem more desirable to dispatch women on these missions than men, who can, after all, be trained to carry out other functions. Organizations have also been known to deploy female bombers in order to heighten their media profile: despite the fact that women have participated in suicide terrorism throughout the modern era, the near universal perception of women as givers, rather than takers of life, still ensures that the use of female suicide bombers will shock audiences and thus, will garner media attention.
None of this is to imply that it isn’t worth our time to explore the motivations that drive individuals to execute suicide attacks. These studies can disclose critical information, such as the fact that, apart from the same factors that influence men to walk down this tragic path, women are often driven to execute suicide attacks by a set of considerations that apply uniquely to them. We’ve already addressed one way in which ultra-conservative, Islamist norms shunt women into suicide attacks. The fact that such societies customarily label as deviants those women who engage in behaviors that would go unremarked upon in men—such as remaining unmarried at a late age, failing to have children, having pre- or extra-marital sex—can also play a part in this decision: Rather than bear this cross, women may be driven to seek expiation through so-called martyrdom operations. Parenthetically, it bears repeating that I’ve encountered women who rationalized their attempted suicides in terms that were almost identical to those used by men.
While conservative Islamic mores can make women willing, if not eager, to execute suicide attacks, they make it less likely that women will participate in suicide terrorism in the same numbers as their male counterparts. Fears that incorporating women into the ranks will destabilize the patriarchal status quo, wherein women are the bearers and rearers of Jihadists, rather than Jihadists themselves; fears that using women will telegraph the message that the organization’s male warriors “aren’t men enough for the job”; all seem to outweigh the new fatwas that license female entry into this arena.
In this context, it is worth noting that the fact that women are so rarely deployed on these missions makes it somewhat difficult to determine whether they are indeed more successful suicide bombers than their male counterparts. Women only constitute, after all, roughly ten percent of suicide bombers. How, then, are we to compare their actions with those of their male counterparts? Victim count? Most successful male vs. most successful female? There are simply too many variables in this equation to allow us to resolve it satisfactorily. The idea that women are more suitable for assassination operations, while intriguing, would also seem to require further investigation.
Finally, it is perhaps worth revisiting the idea that using female suicide bombers is a win-win proposition. While female suicide bombers are often publicly canonized in the Islamic world, in off-camera discussions with Palestinian families and dispatchers, as well as with failed female suicide bombers, significant reservations often arose over the idea of using women in this capacity. Their discomfort is a product both of the fact that such women inevitably come into close contact with males before being dispatched (perhaps even being touched by men whilst donning the suicide belt) and of the fact that they might end up in Israeli jails, unable to maintain requisite standards of modesty and at the mercy of Israeli men. This contact is often seen as a stain upon the woman’s honor and by extension, upon the reputation of the family as a whole. It would seem then, that even though, as Mia Bloom astutely discerns, female suicide bombers are indeed often very useful tools, those who employ women in such capacities will ultimately pay a severe price for doing so—a price that will likely be exacted by the clans of the dispatched women.
Yoram Schweitzer is director of the Terrorism Project at the Institute for National Security Studies, Israel.
As someone with years of experience on this subject, I want to add a few points to those that have now been raised by my good friends Mia Bloom and Yoram Schweitzer, whose work I respect deeply.
Many scholars correctly state that there are a host of motivations that could drive women—and men—to commit a suicide attack. Therefore, while I tend to emphasize the personal drivers of violence, I also emphasize that women have a relationship to men. This point is so often muted; that is, research on female terror is often portrayed as a gender-specific study when in fact, Muslim women often cannot enter male-dominated and male-directed terror organizations without their permission. Thus, women’s entry into extremists organizations is in most cases possible because of a male family member’s participation in violence or the loss of a male family member due to violence. I have seen both scenarios in my own work and field research.
Second, no one discounts that differences between men and women exist, though for years I have argued that women and men share similar grievances and may have similar motives for joining terrorist groups. In my own research, there is one distinction women highlight. In my own interviews of Iraqi women and Kashmiris in Srinagar, women tell me that in times of conflict, they suffer more than men. They are victims of violence and yet also encouraged to commit violent acts. An observer might call this outright abuse of women in war,al though abuse certainly does not explain why all women join terror organizations. Here, Yoram Schweitzer’s argument is reasonable, and also accepted by Mohammad Hafez and others. The organizational factor is powerful, and in Iraq, where I have focused my current research, it is certainly true that insurgents actively recruit women to perpetrate suicide attacks. This is particularly visible in pro-insurgent websites that include statements by clerics, terrorist leaders and other insurgents calling on women to “serve” their men in times of war. This act of service, as Yoram notes, includes suicide missions. But it is the auxiliary role that women provide which is long-lasting and in my opinion, influential (i.e., support their sons and husbands financially and logistically). In times of need (when men are increasingly captured or killed), women act as messengers as well. As communication nodes, I have argued that women keep terrorists alive.
Third, accepting that organizations manipulate women’s emotions and vulnerabilities, we should accept that women do volunteer for these acts. I met a woman in Kashmir, who when she was 18 years old volunteered to commit a fedayeen attack against the Indian Army. She was then a member of Lashkar-e-Tayyba, now camouflaged as Jamaat-ud-Dawa. She told me last month that the operation was foiled, which really upset her. “I wanted to prove that I could further the cause so I asked to be part of another operation, but they said no. That’s when I joined a political organization.” Today, she is a non-violent protester, but after hearing her story, it is clear to me that when the opportunity arises, she will again volunteer. The point is that not all women are manipulated, as Mia Bloom rightly states when she gives the example of Palestinian women who self-select for operations.
Finally, I do not know if it is worth comparing men to women in terror organizations. In almost every instance, it seems clear that women join terror organizations because they are “permitted” to join by the men who lead them. It is so rare to find women leading women, particularly in Islamic organizations where traditional, cultural, and religious norms prohibit close contact. There are ample examples to prove this point. However, I have seen that not all Islamic societies impose strict norms on their women. What male mujahideen and ex-militants have told me is that while they have a duty to protect their women, they also say women have a right to jihad. And I have met women who have never married because they have devoted their lives to the “cause.” Each Islamic society practices Islam differently.
Farhana Ali is Associate International Policy Analyst at RAND.