Women to the forefront in Chechen terrorism
The most worrisome manifestation of the determination of the Chechen rebels to engage in indiscriminate killing is growing use of female suicide bombers who have dramatically changed the game of payoffs in the terrorists' power play with the Russian authorities. Nearly impossible to profile, these female suicide bombers have proved unstoppable, and so far, the most destructive weapon in the Chechen rebel arsenal. These “Black Widows” - as they have been dubbed by sensationalist journalists - have helped the Chechen insurgency to assert itself as one of the hottest fronts of the global jihad. The female suicide bombers became the Chechen rebels’ weapon of choice after the October 2002 hostage-taking raid on a Moscow theater. Nineteen of 41 attackers were the masked females, clad in black and carrying belts laden with explosives. Journalists dubbed these improvised explosive devices as "belts of shahids”. Not counting the 129 hostages who died in that raid, Chechen female suicide bombers led 12 suicide attacks that claimed the lives of some 330 people in the two years following the October 2002 incident. That death toll does not include the 1-3 September attack on the Beslan school in Russia’s North Ossetia, in which between two and four female suicide bombers are believed to have been among the 32-strong force and during which at least 330 people died. Richard Pape of the University of Chicago has calculated that a global average of 13 people have been killed in single suicide attacks between 1998 and 2001, compared with an average of 28 people killed in a single suicide attack perpetrated by Chechen rebels during that same time period - meaning that Chechen suicide bombers are beating the world's average by a factor of larger than two.
Profiling the ‘black widows’
Just as with female suicide bombers across the world, Chechen female suicide bombers do not have a single, clear profile. They are not necessarily young, although a majority of those whose identities have been established were younger than 30. Not all of them were religious before disappearing from their homes only to resurface for attack. Not all of them have lost close relatives in the fighting against Russian troops or in the brutal purges of Chechen civilians by Russian security services. The identified suicide bombers have not been living in abject poverty, nor were they known to have been raped or otherwise tortured and humiliated at the hands of the Russian military - with the exception of the first “black widow” identified, Luiza Gazuyeva, who blew herself up with a Russian officer in 2001, after he had mocked her and said he had killed her husband with his own hands. The common opinion shared by many liberal Russian and Western commentators is that the desperation wrought by the brutalities of the Russian military assault and the mopping-up operations are the major factors pushing Chechen women over the edge. Based on that theory, the proposed recipe for limiting suicide attacks is for Russia to soften its policies in Chechnya and begin seeking a truce with those referred as "moderate" Chechen rebels.
Despair versus organization
Conflicts like the crisis in Chechnya create thousands of aggrieved people, only a handful of whom opt to channel their despair into suicide terrorist attacks. The fact that the attacks by Chechen female suicide bombers come clustered in time, or happen well outside Chechnya, or are integrated into bigger terrorist operations, like the latest hostage-taking raid in Beslan, indicate that there is an organization behind the attacks, which capitalizes on the bombers’ grievances and channels them strategically. It is the existence of the organization, rather than existence of grievances, that determines the occurrence, scope, and pattern of suicide attacks. The grievances and casualties the Chechen civilians suffered in the first military conflict of 1994-1996 were of no lesser scale than those in the second war, which has dragged on since 1999. However, there were no rebel suicide bombings during the first war, though this kind of terrorist warfare proliferated in other aggrieved regions of the world. One probable explanations is that during the first conflict, the Chechens were led under nationalist banners and by only a very few, primarily foreign, jihadist elements. In the second Chechen war, the operational initiative in the Chechen resistance was hijacked by jihadists, with infiltration of the cause by Arab insurgents - who import effective terrorist tactics from other jihad fronts - increasingly becoming a defining characteristic of the Chechen cause. The use of the female suicide bomber is one such tactic.
Religious motives rule
The logistics of suicide bombing is very simple and does not require special expertise or intelligence sharing with other terrorist organizations that have advanced their techniques. The most critical aspect of preparation for a suicide attack seems to be the indoctrination of the future suicide bomber. There is scant evidence of how the suicide bombers are psychologically prepared for the attacks, and what evidence is available indicates that religion is used as the inspirational, motivational, and legitimizing base for the attacks. In one such example, the 19 female suicide bombers that participated in the raid on the Moscow theater in 2002 recorded a video statement before their mission, which was broadcast by al-Jazeera television and then posted on the rebel website Kavkazcenter.com. In the lengthy speeches by the women, all clad in black Arabic garb, the word “Chechen” appeared only once. In all other instances, the women framed their future mission as a retaliatory act against Russian President Vladimir Putin for his war on Muslims. However, the act of female suicide bombing is not a purely religious phenomenon, and there are several secular extremist organizations that practice it, such as the Kurdish Workers' Party (now known as Kongra-Gel) or the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. The choice of religion for the indoctrination of executives and the legitimization of attacks becomes clearer when it is considered that the group that claimed responsibility for the recent series on bombings in Russia was called Riyadus Salihin - a group created by the leader of the Islamist wing of the Chechen resistance, Shamil Basaev. Just as religion easily evokes cosmic scenarios when individual lives cost little compared to grandiose causes, Basaev - if he wishes to continue to enjoy support for his perceived vast constituency - needs to propel religious motives in his fight.
Strategic deployment
The benefits of the Chechen rebels’ use of female suicide bombers is cheap but sensational warfare. The media, so essential to terrorist groups, is sucked in by the drama of self-sacrifice for a cause, with the centrality of women having a force-multiplying effect on the viewer’s consciousness. In Russia, where a bloody history has helped people to develop a considerable psychological resilience towards images of violence, one would have to go as far as killing oneself in order to be taken seriously. Several dozen female suicide bombers - virtually unstoppable by law enforcers who still stick to an obsolete profile of a terrorist as of a young dark-complexioned male - have performed extremely well in terms of affecting the public sentiment in Russia, compared with the overall decade-long war in Chechnya where thousands civilians and soldiers perished without, indeed, instilling serious public fears about the Russian government's ability to protect its citizens. In what could arguably be called a new “innovation” in suicide bombing, Chechen rebels have begun including their “black widows” in larger commandos for more complex missions, like the latest hostage-taking raid in Beslan. Such inclusion dramatically decreases the opportunities of the government to handle hostage crises, doing away with the possibility of negotiating ransoms, safe retreats, or other concessions that may appeal to the self-interests of a commando's members. The inclusion of female suicide bombers also cements the terrorist group, providing its leader with an efficient tool to deter dissent within the commando that might arise when the self-interests of its members come into conflict with the group's mission.
Why women?
There were several explanation as to why Chechen terrorist attack planners have opted for such a high ratio of women – more than two-thirds - in their suicide bomber ranks, which is well above the proportions in other terrorist groups. Some observers point at the low social status of widows and single women in Chechnya, the main pool of recruitment for suicide attacks. In the meantime, Chechen insiders claim that the social status of Chechen women has grown considerably in the past several years as they have become the primary breadwinners in Chechen families and the only ones able to more or less safely approach Russian and local security officials with demands to free their abducted male relatives. Other experts stress the fact that women are more emotional than men and can be more easily indoctrinated. This contradicts the notion of the larger social responsibility of women as of family-keepers in traditional patriarchal societies like Chechen. But more pragmatic reasons seem to provide more plausible explanations for the predominant, and increasingly exclusive use by Chechen rebels of women as living bombs. Protracted guerilla life in Chechnya better suits men, a fact making women comparably more expendable combat assets than men. But what is more important, the use of women who were almost immediately given by the ominous title of “black widows” by Russian media has proved to be paying off. Black Widows have now become a high-value franchise, and it will be strategically unwise for rebels to jeopardize its integrity. Making men perpetrators of suicide attacks would now be a step back in how terrorists shape their threat and how the public perceives it. And indeed, “project black widow” as become a well-established franchise. Media reports highlighting the public’s fear of these new warriors have been numerous in recent times, with Russian travelers in just one of many incidents refusing to board a plane along with women dressed in Muslim garb.
Nabi Abdullaev is a Dagestani journalist and researcher working with The Moscow Times daily. He holds a degree in public administration from Harvard University, where he studied terrorism and international security. Presently, he is a researcher at the Washington-based Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.