Women of Al Qaeda

Some Chechen women who have lost husbands or sons in the war want to live only long enough to take revenge. The first attack by a "black widow," in the summer of 2000, killed 27 members of the Russian Special Forces. Then the spectral, silent presence of 18 "widows" during the deadly hostage siege of a Moscow theater in 2002 heightened their mystique. Over a four-month period in 2003, Chechen women carried out six out of seven suicide attacks on Russian targets, killing 165 people. Women bombers allegedly brought down two Russian airliners last year, killing all 90 passengers and crew.

Yet it's hard to say these Chechen women, whatever their grim accomplishments, have won respect in their own brutal world. The one detailed chronicle that exists of how a would-be martyr was trained is the confession of Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, who was 23 when she was caught two years ago. She had been kidnapped by a man 20 years older than she, a metal trader, and was pregnant with her first child when he was shot. ("Something went wrong between him and his competitors.") After some petty thievery, Muzhakhoyeva became a disgrace to her family. Her child was taken away. She volunteered for a suicide mission and was given training, a target and a bomb--but decided in the end that she didn't want to die, and gave herself up. In a long prison interview with the newspaper Izvestiya, Muzhakhoyeva talked about her male handlers almost like a streetwalker talking about her pimps: "Rustam treated me well, always told me jokes, never talked about death with me. On the one hand, he trained me to be a suicide bomber. On the other hand, we laughed like crazy when we saw each other. Because of that I was under the impression that maybe I wouldn't even have to blow myself up, that somehow I would survive. Rustam's wife hated me."

In the Middle East, Palestinian women have been among the ranks of fighters and terrorists attacking Israel since at least the 1970s, but the first to become a suicide bomber was Wafa Idris, a 27-year-old ambulance worker, who killed an Israeli civilian and wounded 140 in January 2002. In death she became a celebrity. More women and girls volunteered to die for a branch of Yasir Arafat's secular Fatah organization. He talked of an "army of roses," and the leadership of the radical religious organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were taken by surprise. Sheik Yassin, the crippled spiritual leader of Hamas, opposed the use of women as bombers. There were more than enough men, he said.

Still, Palestinian women clamored to fight and die to try to free their homeland. They argued that since the days of the Prophet Muhammad, women warriors have battled for the banner of Islam. Yassin and other religious scholars eventually gave ground, but only after debating how long a woman on a suicide mission could be away without a chaperone--before she died.

Not until January of last year did a woman from Hamas carry out an operation. Reem Riashi, a mother of two, recorded a videotape before her mission, saying she hoped her "organs would be scattered in the air" and her soul "would reach paradise." Would there be 72 houris to greet her there? No. The religious scholars who endorse suicide attacks have described an alternative paradise for women. Thauria Hamur, a 26-year-old captured by the Israelis before she could set off a bomb in May 2002, told NEWSWEEK in a prison interview that women martyrs would "become the purest and most beautiful form of angel at the highest level possible in heaven."

IV. The Hunt For Answers
In a letter written from hiding by Ayman Al-Zawahiri last summer, and meant for Zarqawi to read in Iraq, the Egyptian physician paused to talk about the women in his life. His "favorite wife," he wrote, was crushed by the concrete of a collapsed ceiling in an American bombing. "She went on calling for aid to lift the stone block off her chest until she breathed her last, may God have mercy on her and accept her among the martyrs," Zawahiri wrote in the letter, which was intercepted and disseminated by American intelligence. "As for my young daughter, she was afflicted by a cerebral hemorrhage, and she continued for a whole day suffering in pain until she expired. And to this day I do not know the location of the graves of my wife, my son, my daughter."