Bombshell
THE MANY FACES OF
WOMEN TERRORISTS
MIA BLOOM
VIKING CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © Mia Bloom, 2011
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Bloom, Mia, 1968–
Bombshell : the many faces of women terrorists / Mia Bloom.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-670-06982-8
1. Women terrorists. 2. Terrorism. I. Title.
HV6431.B5758 2011 363.325082 C2010-906198-5
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To my loving husband, John, for everything he does and everything he is
CONTENTS
Preface
Prologue: Moscow, March 2010
1 A Brief History of Terror and the Logic of Oppression
2 The Black Widow Bombers
3 The “Pregnant” Bomber
4 The Scout
5 The Future Bombers
6 The Crucial Links
7 The Recruiters and Propagandists
8 The Fours Rs plus One
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
As the number of female terrorists and suicide bombers has increased several hundredfold in the past few years, the trend has been accompanied by a barrage of misinformation and misperception about what is actually going on. Many people have assumed that women could not consciously choose to participate in terrorism of their own volition. The underlying assumption is that a man made her do it. In their attempts to explain women’s involvement in terrorism for a general audience, journalistic accounts have presented a far too simple and unidimensional account of the phenomenon.
We need to work past gender stereotypes and begin to examine the conditions that really influence female violence. We do not want to excuse the women’s behavior, nor do we want to denude their actions of their political motivation. Lots of women are just as bloodthirsty as the male members of terrorist groups, but women’s motivations tend to be intricate, multi-layered, and inspired on a variety of levels. Anger, sorrow, the desire for revenge, and nationalist or religious zeal coalesce in ways that make any simple explanation impossible. Given that terrorist groups gain so much from women’s participation, it is far easier to understand why terrorist groups seek female activists than to explain why women oblige them by heeding the call to action.
I have attempted to make these complexities accessible for as wide an audience as possible, from the general reader to the counterterrorism analyst. I aim to clarify the various reasons why women might choose terror and to explain the many roles they take on when they make that choice.
My work has always sought to bridge the divide between political science and policy. To understand what is going on, I have found we need to better understand the past. If we fail to take into account the history of violence, we will never be able to anticipate what is likely to happen in the future.
The stories presented in this book shed light on the conditions under which women are mobilized themselves or mobilize others for terrorism. The book also explains the unique pressures women face during conflict and how they can become involved in the struggle, sometimes against their will. The women presented here encompass a spectrum of involvement and provide an insider’s view of the many faces of women and terror.
A few comments regarding names. Where possible, I have used the most common transliterations, although this poses some problems when multiple spellings exist simultaneously. For Russian names, the female patronymic always includes an a, and so within the same family, the women’s last names will be Ganiyeva, for example, while the men’s will be Ganiyev. I have followed standard usage in academic literature and used the a rather than the e for Russian transliteration—for example, Basayev rather than Basaev or Besaev. Also, where either a b or a p is used, I have deferred to the p, and so, for instance, have used the name Vagapov rather than Vagabov, although both occur in journalists’ accounts.
For Chechen names, an additional complication is that Chechens often have official names, which appear on their passports but are rarely used within the family, and nicknames, regularly used at home. For the purposes of consistency, I have provided the reader with both. In many cases the nickname makes sense, and Raisa becomes Reshat, for example; in other cases, however, the nickname has little or no connection to the passport name, and thus Fatima might become Milana.
As for Arabic names, I have used the most common spelling for the names of individuals and organizations, although this too might cause some confusion. Thus the Lebanese terrorist group Party of Allah, more commonly known as Hizb‘allah, can be spelled as Hezbollah, Hizbullah, Hizbollah, or Hizballah. I have chosen the most anglicized version, Hezbollah. The same considerations apply to the name Muhammed, which can also be spelled as Muhammad or Mohammed. Where possible, I have provided the reader with the simplest translations of foreign material when I have used sources in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, or Russian.
PROLOGUE
MOSCOW, MARCH 2010
In the early-morning hours of Monday, March 29, 2010, two men and two women left an apartment in central Moscow. They had used the apartment as a base where they had assembled two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the form of belts, which the women had then wrapped around their stomachs. Each IED contained between two and three hundred grams of explosive and one was packed with nails to maximize the carnage.
A second apartment in the city housed more explosives—up to one kilo of TNT—for future attacks. The apartment had been rented by Akhmed Rabadanov, who had allegedly accompanied the two women from Dagestan to Moscow and eventually taken them to the Sokolnicheskaya or Red Line subway that traverses the center of the city.1 Along its route are some of Moscow’s most important buildings, including the Russian Duma (parliament), the Kremlin, Red Square, and, signific
antly, the headquarters of the old KGB, now occupied by its successor, the Federal Security Forces or FSB.
The younger of the two women, Djennet Abdurakhmenova (a.k.a. Abdullaeva), boarded the train headed toward the Ulitsa Podbelskogo station around 8:20 A.M. The rush-hour crowd filled the cars to capacity and she had to stand in the middle of the fifth car for the whole journey. As many as half a million commuters were riding the trains that morning. As people rushed in and out of the car and the train made its way through the center of the city, Djennet looked at her watch nervously. The train was taking longer than usual to reach its destination. Instead of six minutes, it was taking more than twenty minutes, and the delay seemed to agitate her. The attacks were planned to occur consecutively to achieve maximum psychological impact, and Djennet wanted to make sure that she kept as close to schedule as possible.
Djennet wore a bulky purple jacket to hide the bomb, but the jacket looked far too big for her tiny frame. Her exotic Asian features were hallmarks of a mixed Azeri-Kumyk parentage. Muscovites were now chronically afraid of Chechen women, and a few shot nervous glances in her direction, even though it had been five years since a female suicide bomber had launched an attack on the Moscow metro. Djennet’s baby face made her look very young, but her strange demeanor and behavior did not match her innocent appearance.
In the middle of the car twenty-three-year-old Sim eih Xing, a Malaysian medical student from Penang, stood behind Djennet and observed her curiously. Djennet’s posture was all wrong and her pupils were dilated; she barely blinked at all. Xing assumed that she was on drugs or perhaps mentally ill, and he slowly moved away from her. As he brushed past her, he confirmed that there was definitely something wrong with her. But his thoughts drifted to his impending surgical exams and how tired he was from the challenges of medical school. For reasons that Xing still cannot explain, he decided to exit the train three stops early, at Park Kultury, though he had planned to stay on until Okhotny Ryad. The Red Line trains were stopping and starting every few minutes, frustrating everyone on board. Later, people would realize that the delay had been caused by the first bomb, which rocked Moscow’s metro at the Lubyanka station at 7:52 A.M.
As Xing exited the car by the middle door, a massive shock wave hit him from behind and knocked him to the ground. When he regained consciousness seconds later he could not hear anything, but saw bodies all around him. Smoke billowed out of the subway car and the smell of burnt rubber and skin permeated the air. When his hearing returned moments later, he could hear screams and the wail of approaching ambulances on the street above. Bloodied people ran past him as he stood up and walked out of the station in a daze. He looked back over his shoulder at the smoldering subway car and on its floor saw a dozen bodies piled up and various body parts strewn about. On the bloodstained floor lay Djennet’s motionless corpse, her severed head a few feet away.
Xing climbed the stairs to the street. In his head he repeated an Islamic prayer over and over again, worrying that there might be a second bomb and hoping the prayer would afford him some protection. As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled and fell into the street. There was something on his leg. He lifted his jeans’ pant leg to reveal bits of shrapnel and human flesh. The flesh could belong only to Djennet, whose upper body had been blown apart by the bomb. (Other victims were either crushed or killed by shrapnel.) Xing suffered only minor injuries, singed hair, and some cuts and bruises. He was lucky; his impatience and instinct had saved his life. Fourteen people were killed by the blast and dozens more were injured.
Another eyewitness, Angelika Penalgieva, recalled seeing bodies lying all over the platform at the Park Kultury station after the blast. People tried to use their cell phones to call friends and family but most of the calls did not go through. The FSB, worried that the bombs were triggered by cell phones and that there were other bombers on different subway lines, had jammed the cell towers.
Djennet was only seventeen years old when she blew herself up on the Moscow subway. She had grown up in Khasavyurt, a town in northern Dagestan close to the border with Chechnya. She was the widow of Umalat Magomedov (a.k.a. Al-Bara), a jihadi commander for Shariat Jamaat, the largest militant organization in Dagestan, whose founders were trained by Chechen separatist leader Shamil Basayev and fought alongside their Chechen brethren in the wars with Russia. Djennet’s father had abandoned the family when she was a little girl. Her mother’s brother, the oldest male in the family, was responsible for her, but drank heavily. In short, she came from a broken home and sensed that others in the traditional Kumyk society regarded her as inferior.2 Marrying a jihadi leader afforded her the respect and status she did not have growing up.
According to Vladimir Markin, spokesman of the Investigations Committee in the Russian prosecutor-general’s office, the special operation that led to Umalat’s assassination on December 31, 2009, had been one of their most successful. Umalat was killed during a shoot-out with Russian security authorities. After her husband’s death, Djennet was interrogated and photographed. Then she disappeared. Markin claimed that Djennet went straight to a Wahhabi training camp for three months of instruction.3 At the end of the training, she was sent onto the subway as a suicide bomber.
Djennet was a classic Black Widow: a teenaged bride now alone and vulnerable to jihadi recruiters. Russian sources claimed that she was radicalized and recruited only after Umalat’s death, but private photos of Djennet and Umalat have emerged in which she holds a pistol in her hand and has a look of fierce determination on her face. She was clearly radicalized before Umalat’s death but probably became active only afterward. The Russians believe that Djennet was trained by Shariat Jamaat to avenge Umalat’s death.4 It seems likely, however, that the attack against Moscow’s subways was retaliation not just for one man’s death, but also for the policy of assassination by which the FSB was picking off jihadi leaders, one by one.
Across town, at 7:45 A.M., Djennet’s colleague, Maryam Sharipova, boarded a different train on the Red Line. Maryam was unlike Djennet in every respect. She was older, twenty-eight, and her alleged husband was still alive. More important, for a woman, Maryam was highly educated by Dagestani standards; both her parents were teachers and she had completed high school and then graduated with an honors degree in mathematics and psychology from the Dagestan Pedagogical University in 2005. She was always at the top of her class and received straight As. After graduation, she took a job in her home village teaching computer science for four years, becoming the school’s head of information technology prior to the attack.
In order to carry out her mission, Maryam traveled overland for nearly twenty hours straight to reach her target. Her parents claimed to have seen her in Dagestan as late as March 28, the day before the attack. Maryam was such an unlikely bomber that Russian authorities initially stated that the second Moscow bomber was Maria Ustarkhanova, another Dagestani widow of a jihadi fighter. Only when Maryam’s father, Magomed-Rasul, recognized the red headscarf she was wearing did Russian authorities change their story. Magomed-Rasul called the authorities after pictures of the bombers were posted on the Internet; Maryam’s friends and family had recognized her instantly. He later officially identified his daughter from three photos of her detached head.5
The only girl in a family of boys, Maryam was modest and reserved, an ardent Muslim but not radical in her views.6 She grew up in a small, steel-gated house in Balakhani, a little hillside village with no running water or electricity, typical of Dagestan. Her house was a traditional Avar two-storied home, with low ceilings, spacious rooms, and a small courtyard. Balakhani is sandwiched between bare cliffs overgrown with pines and encircled by orchards that in the spring are cloaked in white apricot blossoms. Magomed-Rasul claimed that his daughter left home on the afternoon of March 28 to visit a girlfriend and never returned.
What her parents didn’t know is that Maryam had secretly married a thirty-five-year-old jihadi, Magomedali Vagapov, the leader of the rebel Gubden Jamaat group,
which had trained in Pakistan and had been fighting Russian government forces since the 1990s. Vagapov reported directly to Dokka Umarov, the top Chechen rebel, who officially took responsibility for the subway bombings. Once Vagapov grew tired of Maryam (he had two other wives), he persuaded her to become a suicide bomber.
Contrary to Islamic tradition, in which the individual must settle accounts before an act of martyrdom, Maryam did not leave a note or a will, and did not organize her worldly affairs before the operation. This has raised questions about whether she intended to be a bomber or knew that the operation in Moscow would end her life. Al Jazeera reported that she had no history of extremism, although both of her brothers had previously been involved with the Chechen resistance.
The younger one, Ilyas, was detained in 2008 for his connection to insurgent fighters operating out of the North Caucasus.7 Her older brother, Anvar, had a more complicated past. He had ties to a radical Islamist group from the fortified village of Gimry (founded by Gazimagomed Magomedov, a fellow native of Balakhani) and several of his friends were killed in guerrilla operations while others were on the run. On the one hand, Anvar fought in the first Chechen war, was in the Dagestani underground, and headed the list of believers in the Wahhabite ideology on the police rolls for 2005. He was amnestied in 2006, however, because there was no blood on his hands. He then moved to Moscow, got married, and started a new life, until his sister’s explosion at the Lubyanka station.
Maryam’s parents remain skeptical that their only daughter would wed in secret. Her father said, “Maryam would never marry without my permission.”8 She was always either at home or at school; there was no opportunity for her to be with her husband. Furthermore, they rebuff the suggestion made by the Russian authorities that Maryam’s older brother, Anvar, had helped coordinate the attacks and drove the two women to the subway.
For a long time after the attacks, no journalists, either Russian or foreign, were permitted into Balakhani to investigate or check the official story disseminated by the FSB.9 One particularly intrepid reporter, Irina Gordienko, managed to get past the checkpoints and interview Maryam’s family; she also conducted phone interviews with Anvar. According to Gordienko, Maryam’s mother, Patimat, asked in disbelief, “How can they say that my oldest son, Anvar, himself took his sister to the site of the act of terrorism? After these events he could not even talk with me; tears were choking him. I keep constant contact with him and to this day he does not believe that Maryam is gone. I am afraid for my son. What will come of him now?”10