Female Suicide Attackers

Bonn (September 1, 2008) – Dr. Christine Schirrmacher of the Institute of Islamic Studies, in response to new reports in Arabic television about Palestinian suicide attackers, warns about an increasing radicalization of women’s Jihad within Islamist circles. While the women’s fulfillment of their domestic duties and their care of the family for a long time was described as “Women’s Jihad”, their contribution as combatants extending even to suicide attacks has been promoted increasingly in the last few years. On August 19, the Arabic broadcaster Al-Jadid / New TV (Lebanon) commemorated in one of its reports the “martyrdom” of the fifty-two year-old Palestinian mother of eight children, Fatima al-Najjar, who, on November 23, 2006, had blown herself up near the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza and injured four Israeli soldiers.

Mothers, too, should sacrifice their lives in defense of the Fatherland

Rim al-Riyashi, who had blown herself up in January, 2005, at the Karni border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel and in the process had killed five Jews, also, according to the reporter, left behind an unforgettable lesson for her two small children about the struggle. If the goal is the defense of the homeland, so the reporter continued, then there is no difference between men and women. The mothers and women of Palestine believe, so the reporter, that death is a fitting price to pay for a free Palestine, compared with a “life of humiliation under the boots of the occupiers”. In such an exceptional situation, women are summoned not only to care for the sick and to look after their children and families. According to the reporter’s research, dozens let themselves be trained each year for such operations. The candidates come from all social classes. As with the men, the recruitment of candidates is limited no longer only to single or divorced women. Among the first suicide attackers was Iyat al-Ahris, an eighteen year-old high school student with above-average grades who only shortly before had engaged herself to be married. Later, married women and mothers with several children, such as al-Najjar and al-Riyashi, followed.

Islamist Organizations: fewer and fewer religious and social objections

Al-Riyashi was the first female suicide attacker from Hamas, and her act also conveyed the message that the religious and social reservations, which for a long time were raised by Hamas as well as by Islamic Jihad against female suicide attackers, had been overcome. While the first four women came from the ranks of the Fatah milita, the Islamist organizations in the meantime increasingly are integrated into the processes of recruitment. In the religious justification for the suicide attack, reference is made above all to a tradition from the Prophet Muhammad, which says:

“Even if only a centimeter of Muslim soil can be conquered through it, then the participation in Jihad (holy war) becomes a fundamental duty that even is to be equated with the duty of prayer (which applies to women as well as to men). A child can go without the permission of its father, a wife without the permission of her husband, and a slave without the permission his master.”

The popular Egyptian Sunni scholar and mufti, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is responsible, among other things, for the certainly best known Islamic website: www.islamonline.com, also calls Palestinian women to engage in combative commitment to Jihad, even to “martyrdom” as the “highest form of Jihad”. In carrying out such operations, he says, women also are permitted to replace the headscarf with another head covering, or to take it off completely. Qaradawi emphasizes the special role of women in the Palestinian resistance struggle since, in his estimation, they possibly can carry out operations that are impossible for men.

On the whole, the state of research on the situation is rather poor. But, some motives for the female suicide attackers have been mentioned up to the present, such as the search for honor and esteem for the family, the Muslim community, and the Muslim religion, but also pressure exerted from the side of the attacker’s family to sacrifice herself, poverty, and handicaps, but also the search for a new emancipated role for women. Of advantage for the female suicide attackers is also the fact that women quite frequently are not searched for explosives by male security forces.

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