In 2008, an Iraqi woman was dropped by several men near a checkpoint manned by local police and known as Kilometer 5 in Iraq. She was wearing a long black abaya and a black veil, and as she neared the checkpoint, she tripped. When several Iraqi police officers rushed to help, she detonated the explosives around her waist, killing two instantly and injuring dozens more. From a recording of the event shot by her fleeing co-conspirators, one of the men in the car can unmistakably be heard saying, “God is great! The stupid woman did it.” Her name was Hasna Maryi, middle aged, unmarried, not particularly religious, and certainly not stupid. So, why did she do it?
While it is impossible to precisely guage any bomber’s exact reason to commit an act of violent terror, particularly in a retroactive analysis composed of partial evidence, it is possible to piece together the major life events which might have contributed to the suicide bomber’s ultimate decision. My research examines the lives, wasiyehs (videotaped confessions, or wills), and families of the women who undertook terror activity in Iraq between 2003 and 2009. This analysis demonstrates that the vast majority of female suicide bombers had experienced the trauma of a male family member’s death in the recent past, or were struggling with diagnosed mental disabilities.
Until recently, Muslim female suicide bombers were a rarely-occurring phenomenon. To be sure, women have long participated in terrorist activity – one researcher refers to terrorism as women’s “third oldest profession”. According to the vast majority of Islamic exegetical literature, women should occupy traditionally feminine roles, such as childbearing, homemaking, and when required, supporting male fighters. If women are to be involved in terror organizations, they are typically expected to occupy administrative roles.
However, the number of women participating in suicide terror activity in Iraq sharply increased in the past two decades. Open source data indicates that women have been recruited, radicalized, and operationalized in drastically higher numbers since 2007.
Women may be making these decisions on their own, and not in a strict sense “coerced”; however they are shaped by environmental factors which are so deeply embedded into their identity as women that their rationale calculus is clouded.
One American psychologist and suicide researcher argues that ideological motives are often projected onto mentally unstable suicide bombers. He argues that we can easily build a psychological profile of suicide bombers, both male and female, which rests upon differing cases of derangement. Men, he says, tend to demonstrate psychopathy, severe depression, bipolar disorders, and substance abuse. Women, on the other hand, tend to demonstrate equally prevalent signs of PTSD, hopelessness, and despair.
I believe that there is room for a much broader conversation which examines how mental health issues are treated in the Middle East, and how the above mentioned patterns in thought and behavior remain consistent across many different bomber profiles. Sources have recently begun to alert the public to widespread mental health issues in various Arab countries, where stigmatization and a lack of proper medical infrastructure prevents youth and adults alike from seeking help. According to some reports, a staggering 17% of Iraqi adults and 50% of Moroccans suffer from mental disorders, while under 5% seek treatment. This begs the question: in a culture where suicide is absolutely forbidden, is martyrdom simply a socially and religiously acceptable option for ending one’s life when besieged by depression, despair, or trauma?
The clock is ticking. In a conversation with Barbara Victor, author of the groundbreaking work “Army of Roses,” who lived and worked in Palestine during Arafat’s galvanization of his female jihadi army, “The world is growing tired of suicide bombers, and even operationalizing young women and girls fails to produce the emotionally charged reaction it once did.” When I asked Ms. Victor what that might mean for the future of security and counterterrorism, she expressed the concern that extremist organizations such as Al Qaeda were on the hunt for more shocking methods of suicide terrorism. Reports over the past several years of Boko Haram’s utilization of mentally handicapped child bombers and ISIS’s use of mother-and-child suicide actors indicates that Ms. Victor is correct – terrorist organizations, especially ones associated with the Al Qaeda of the early American occupation of Iraq, are interested in maximizing the shock and awe they produce in both Western as well as Middle Eastern media.
Development and aid institutions must prioritize intervention programs which provide safe spaces and halfway houses for Iraqi women who have experienced extreme trauma and feel hopelessly out of place in their own villages and families. One Iraqi woman interviewed by the New York Times expressed her desire to provide these spaces to women whose lives had been torn apart by the loss of their brothers, husbands, and fathers.
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