Women of Al Qaeda

The directions for physical and spiritual cleansing that Muhammad Atta gave out to his fellow hijackers before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States advise them to "feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage [in heaven] is very short." Atta's own personal will, written in 1996, is a study in obsessive carnality. "Women must not be present at my funeral or go to my grave at any later date," he wrote. "He who washes my body around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not touched there." In the mind of such a man, suicidal sacrifice is a path to ecstasy. There would have been no place in Atta's Qaeda for the women suicide bombers of today.

III. Killers & Virgins
What changed? The simplest answer is that al Qaeda's core organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan and its avant-garde in Iraq need more recruits. Jordanian researcher Hassan Abu Hanieh, who knew Zarqawi personally, says the terrorist leader is goading Muslim men. Before the attacks by women began, a Web site often linked to Zarqawi posted a message signed by him. "Are there no men, so that we have to recruit women?" he asked at the conclusion. "Isn't it a shame for the sons of my own nation that our sisters ask to conduct martyrdom operations while men are preoccupied with life?"

Zarqawi's sense of urgency may be fueled by the fact that he's on the run. "Since the first of this year, we have taken out 117 members of the leadership of the Zarqawi network, tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3," General Lynch told the press last week. But the need for recruits could also reflect a movement that is expanding, or aiming to expand, in both size and scope.

Of course, Zarqawi is also meeting a demand--by women. "The recourse to women doesn't happen at the start," says Haizam Amirah Fernandez, a Madrid-based analyst. "It comes when the battle escalates to all sectors of society. It happens after men become activists in guerrilla groups, fight and die, perhaps in suicide attacks. Then the widows or family members --seek vengeance, or want to give their life in the same cause."

Al-Rishawi, the failed suicide bomber in Jordan, had lost three brothers and her sister's husband to the war with the Americans. Some women who first shocked and terrified Israel in 2002 were motivated by the deaths of family and friends. But the most striking cult of vengeance, setting an example for other jihadist organizations, is the "black widows" of Chechnya. Although they have attracted relatively scant attention in the West--their targets are mostly Russian--their example among heroines of jihad is an important factor in the spread of suicidal terror.

The tales of these Chechen women are as much about tawdry victimization as battlefield heroics. They come from a rugged society where an old tradition, made worse after years of gunslinging war and anarchy, allows men to kidnap the bride of their choice. The kidnappers can settle disputes with the woman's family in cash, or with violence, according to Lida Yusupova of the Memorial Human Rights Center in Grozny. But once she's been taken, she's unlikely to find another husband. "No intelligent, nice young man in Chechnya would marry a nonvirgin girl," says Yusupova.