Terrorism is No Longer a Male-Only Preserve

Their arrest last month hit front pages around the world. Married for only three years and with an eight-month-old baby, they are now in British police custody, suspected of plotting to bring down several U.S. passenger jets over the Atlantic -- a plan that, had it succeeded, could have killed thousands. Ahmed Abdullah Ali, 25, is charged with conspiracy to murder. Historically, Islamist jihadis have kept spouses, siblings, and relatives in the dark, but not in this case: Abdullah’s wife, Cossar Ali, 23, is charged with failure to disclose information about the plot.

If they are convicted, the Alis would not be the first couple to sign up for holy war with Al Qaeda. On November 9, 2005, Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert to Islam, became only the second woman to conduct an Al Qaeda suicide bombing, detonating a bomb near Baghdad in Baquba as she drove past a U.S. patrol, killing herself and injuring one soldier. (Little is known about the first female Al Qaeda suicide bomber, who attacked U.S. and Iraqi forces in Tal Afar in late September 2005.) Degauque’s husband, Hissam Goris, a Moroccan Belgian who had accompanied her to Iraq, died the same day, shot by U.S. forces as he prepared to launch a suicide attack near Fallujah. Across the border in Jordan only hours after Degauque’s attack, another Al Qaeda husband-and-wife team walked into a wedding reception in the Radisson hotel in Amman, Jordan. Only a faulty explosive belt prevented Sajida Al Rishawi from becoming Al Qaeda’s third female suicide bomber, she confessed later. The man she married just days earlier had pushed her outside before blowing himself up.

Five years ago today, 19 men brought jihad to America’s attention. But terrorism is no longer a male-only preserve. In a perverse kind of militant Islamist feminism, radical Muslim women -- particularly from Western countries -- are signing up for Al Qaeda’s jihad, often in tandem with their husbands. This growing trend means that Al Qaeda’s narrative (of the United States and its allies at war with Islam) is taking hold in the Muslim world -- and not just among rogue men with something to prove; it is also taking hold among women and families. It means that Al Qaeda’s campaign is entering a new phase. Among the Sunni militants who make up its ranks, there has always been a strong taboo against the use of women in combat. But, under the pressure of Islamist propaganda (images of Muslims suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon), that taboo has crumbled. Women now threaten the United States just like men.

During the Afghan war against the Soviets, women could only provide moral support from the sidelines. One such woman, Khawla Bint Al Azoor, complained to the Osama bin Laden-funded Jihad magazine in 1987: "I urge you, O young men, to undertake Jihad and martyr yourselves beside your Afghan brothers who are fighting against oppression. I only wish I could give my life and my spirit as a gift to this pure land as a martyr, but I am a girl and not able to do anything." But bin Laden now seems to have embraced women jihadis. Two months after the September 11 attacks, bin Laden told the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, "I became a father of a girl after September 11. I named her Safia after Safia who killed a Jewish spy at the time of the Prophet. [My daughter] will kill enemies of Islam like Safia of the Prophet’s time." In 2004, an Al Qaeda-affiliated website named Al Khansaa was launched in Saudi Arabia to recruit female jihadis.

Al Qaeda is turning more to female operatives and husband-and-wife teams because they give operations a greater chance of success; they attract less suspicion and are less likely to be flagged for security checks. And attacks by women generate maximum publicity. For the same reasons, Chechen and Palestinian terrorists have also increasingly used female suicide attackers for their operations after overcoming initial reluctance. Chechen terrorists deployed "black widows," for instance, to help storm a Moscow theater in 2002 and to bring down two Russian passenger jets in 2004. In 2005, Islamists used female suicide attackers for the first time in Egypt and Kashmir.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates have had particular success in recruiting Western Muslim women, because -- being more emancipated than their counterparts in the Middle East and South Asia -- they have found it easier to become active within militant groups. Degauque’s story is instructive: Little about her youth marked her as a candidate for "martyrdom" in a distant land. Growing up near the rust belt city of Charleroi, south of Brussels, she rebelled against her Catholic petit-bourgeois family -- experimenting with drugs and dating a string of less-than-suitable boyfriends before running away from home, converting to Islam, and marrying Goris, a militant fundamentalist. According to Belgian police, the couple became increasingly radical when it joined the circle of Bilal Soughir, 32, a Tunisian-Belgian suspected of leading a recruiting cell for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Soughir’s cell was particularly innovative in its recruitment of women to fight in Iraq. According to Belgian law enforcement officials, another couple, Brahim Fahmouti and Zorah Bahssi, were also about to leave Antwerp for Iraq in the fall of 2005. And, in the small town of Riemst, a young Rwandan convert -- to date identified only as Angelique -- was being pressed to travel to Iraq by her Belgian-convert boyfriend, Pascal Cruypennick. Angelique, who was not indicted, later gave an emotional interview on Belgian television about how Cruypennick had tried to manipulate her into going to Iraq. (Soughir and Cruypennick are now in Belgian custody awaiting trial.)

In the Netherlands, women played an especially assertive role in planning attacks by the Hofstad group, an extremist network whose wives watched videos of female suicide bombers and posed for photos holding guns. One of the wives, Soumaya Sahla, a 21-year-old nursing student, helped coordinate the attempted assassination of former Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken feminist. She worked out the logistics of the attack and accompanied her husband, Nouredin al Fahtni, as he set out with a machine gun to conduct the attack. Before he could kill Ali, Dutch police overpowered the couple, and Sahla is now serving time for weapons possession. Ali, reflecting on the prominent role women played in Hofstad, told the Los Angeles Times, "Western Muslims, whether they like it or not, have grown up with the idea of women being equal."

According to the FBI, Al Qaeda has already recruited at least one senior female operative in the United States, Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT alumnus and neuroscientist of Pakistani descent in her mid-thirties. Siddiqui and her husband first attracted the suspicion when American investigators learned that their bank card was used in December 2001 to purchase $8,000 of night goggles, body armor, and military equipment to be shipped to Pakistan. During the ‘90s, Siddiqui lived in Boston and was an activist for Islamist causes like the war in Bosnia. According to Deborah Scroggins, who profiled Siddiqui for Vogue, she was also an active member of the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York -- essentially Al Qaeda’s U.S. headquarters in the early ‘90s. After his March 2003 capture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the September 11 mastermind, reportedly told his American interrogators that Siddiqui was plotting to launch attacks in the United States. She disappeared into Pakistan sometime in March 2003, and her present location is unknown.

Malika el Aroud is a textbook case of how a woman brought up in the West can be drawn into al Qaeda’s ambit, and she told us how women jihadis were both gaining acceptance in the Muslim world and goading men on, not to be outdone themselves. Aroud, a Moroccan-Belgian woman, plunged into fundamentalism after a rebellious youth of drinking and clubbing. She married a Tunisian-Belgian fundamentalist who was killed by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan after he assassinated its leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, on orders from Osama bin Laden that he kept secret from her. In her own community, Aroud says, attacks by female jihadis like Degauque send a message: "It’s a woman saying, ‘Look what I, a woman, have done. And you, the men -- are you capable of the same?’" A poem posted by an unidentified man on a jihadi web forum following Degauques’s suicide attack in Iraq makes the point:

Sister you have embarrassed me

You have accomplished what I failed to do.

And what men with long beards and turbans have also failed to accomplish.

What have you done to us?

You relentless, honorable woman.

The fact that women are enlisting for jihad will make Al Qaeda’s campaign more sustainable in the long term. One reason that Hamas, for example, has been able to prolong its suicide bombing campaign for so long is because its bombers are lionized by men and women alike. Another is that, by accepting female jihadis, terrorist groups double the number of potential recruits.

Alarmingly, the radicalization of Muslim women in Western countries is increasing, and their militarization is bound to follow. When one of us went to a meeting organized by by the Saviour Sect, a now-banned British Islamic group in East London in June, several rows of women, fully veiled, were sitting attentively behind their husbands -- a scene that is now typical in such meetings across the United Kingdom but was almost unthinkable ten years ago. Attendees were shown footage of bin Laden calling for jihad and images of Muslim casualties in Iraq. The next month, just blocks away, Abdullah Ahmed Ali and his wife Cossar were reportedly planning to down U.S. airplanes.