Almost a decade into the global war on terrorism, the academic and intelligence communities have yet to agree on whether psychological profiles of militant women are a useful paradigm. Few scholars are able to ascertain common patterns across various conflicts and countries from which female terrorists emerge. Others question the utility of trying to study female terrorists as distinct or unique from terrorists more generally.¹ Scholars scanning the literature of jihadi mythologies as well as statements, trial transcripts, and other communication nodes do reveal common themes expressed by many women—and men—engaged in violent action.² These themes largely reflect...

There are as many myths and sensationalized stories about women insurgents and terrorists in history as there are women terrorists and insurgents. One such myth grows out of the image of Leila Khaled with her machine gun—she is the “sexy” poster girl for terrorism, like Farrah Fawcett for Charlie’s Angels. Helena Kennedy says that Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin of the Weather Underground and Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin of the Baader-Meinhof gang “have all provoked more interest and speculation than their male comrades.” Unfortunately, such attention has little if anything to do with their politics and everything to...

Terrorism has been called “propaganda of the deed.”¹ Yet when women do the deed, the resulting propaganda often has more to do with the women than with their actions. The case of Chechen women involved in the conflict with Russia may be one of the most colorful examples of this dynamic. Until the Dubrovka Theater hostage taking in October 2002, Chechen women were primarily seen as victims of the Russian-Chechen conflict. In the Russian and Western press, Chechen women involved in the theater seizure emerged as vicious, sympathetic, strong, fanatical, foolish, and weak—sometimes all in the same portrayal. Two...

A crescendo of agitation resulted in a bloody summer in Indian Kashmir in 2010. More than one hundred people died in clashes with the security forces, mostly young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.¹ Protests and “stone rage” began on June 11, 2010, when a teenager was killed in police firing. Subsequently, ordinary Kashmiris took to the streets of the Kashmir Valley, shouting anti-India slogans and pelting security forces with stones. This popular agitation has been referred to as Kashmir’s intifada, with all citizens—men, women, and children—dictating the agenda of the separatist politicians. Curfews andhartals...

In March 2002, I had an opportunity to interview Leila Khaled. A Palestinian born in 1944, Khaled vividly remembers the shelling of Haifa by the Israeli Defense Forces and her family’s subsequent flight from Palestine.¹ Raised in a politically active family, Khaled has been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp) since 1967. After joining the pflp she carried out two hijackings for them, in August 1969 and September 1970.² She now lives in Amman, Jordan, with her husband and two sons. At the time of the interview, she was still only a member of...

Since Sri Lankan independence in 1948, conflict between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil population has been largely continuous, leading to armed struggle from the 1970s on and civil war from 1983 on, with many Tamils desiring the establishment of an independent Tamil state or some form of federal or autonomous region political structure. While there are many distinct dimensions of this ethnic/nationalist conflict, this chapter focuses on the kinds of roles considered appropriate held by the major separatist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte) for women in nationalist struggles and in society more generally. The ltte...

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the use of suicide bombing as a terrorist tactic and of women as perpetrators of these attacks. At least seventeen organizations have used women as suicide bombers, including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Kurdistan Workers Party, Chechen rebels, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, hamas, and al-Qaeda. These groups have claimed responsibility for female suicide bombings across the globe, in places such as Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Israel, Iraq, and Jordan.¹

Until 2005, al-Qaeda abstained from employing women as suicide bombers. The organization crossed this...

On February 25, 2007, after fighting with the guards, a woman in Iraq blew herself up at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, injuring forty-six and killing forty-one students. Very little information has been found about this woman; in the weeks that followed, rumors circulated that the bomber was neither a woman nor affiliated with al-Qaeda.¹ While there have been a plethora of bombings since the Iraq War began in 2003, each February since 2007 at least one more woman has perpetrated a suicide attack. In February 2008, two women, who possibly had Down syndrome, killed seventy-three people in Baghdad. A February...

Throughout history women have participated in proscribed violence, performing strategic, supportive, and combat roles in a wide range of violent movements.¹ Statistics show that between 1981 and 2007 women carried out approximately 26 percent of all suicide attacks and that there has been a marked rise in women’s participation in such attacks since 2005.² This empirical shift combined with the media attention given to the phenomenon has led a number of policy analysts and academics to conclude that female suicide terrorism is a growing trend.³

In response to the scholarly analyses addressed in the introduction to this volume that treat...