Women pledge suicide for al-Qaeda
'Holy warrior sisters'
Stewart Bell
National Post
nationalpost.com{D9244D80-AEF4-45F3-9490-5FE0844F951C}
Friday, March 14, 2003
JERUSALEM - Al-Qaeda has formed a women's brigade that is preparing to launch a campaign of suicide bombings, according to an interview with its purported leader published in an Arabic-language newspaper.
Um Usama, who described herself as the training supervisor of the "holy warrior sisters," said camps were being established for women she said were eager to participate in Osama bin Laden's campaign of terror.
"We announce the existence of a women's brigade for al-Qaeda now at a point in time that is most unfavourable for Muslims," she said, adding plans for training camps for women "had now become definite and an urgent reality."
The women "can be found in every country" and communicate on the Internet, Ms. Usama said. She identified her supervisor as Mulla Saifuddin, who she said takes instructions from bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader.
"We are getting ready for the big blow that has been announced by our leaders," she said. "I want to confirm that it will be a blow that will not only make America forget the events of Sept. 11 but will also make America forget its name."
The interview appeared this week in Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic daily published in Beirut and London. It was translated into English by the SITE Institute, a Washington, D.C., terrorism research organization.
It comes as Western and allied security and intelligence agencies are bracing for the possibility that followers of radical Islamic groups might stage terrorist attacks in retaliation for the war in Iraq.
Unlike other terror groups, al-Qaeda has never included women in its global jihad. In Afghanistan, it fought in defence of the Taliban, which treated women according to its rigid interpretation of Islamic law.
Under Taliban rule, women were confined to their homes, banned from school and publicly executed for adultery. Al-Qaeda fighters frequently raped, abducted and murdered women when they had the run of Afghanistan.
Ms. Usama said the Muslim religion allows women to take part in a "defensive jihad" and it was now necessary for women to serve as terrorists because so many of the men in the al-Qaeda network had been captured or injured.
Women have played a key role in terrorist organizations for more than a century, from the German and Italian leftist groups of the 1970s to the IRA and the revolutionary movements of Latin America. Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had a women's unit called the Freedom Birds.
It was a female Tamil Tigers suicide bomber that assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, in 1991. Playing the role of an adoring fan, she rushed forward at an election rally to place a flower garland on the prime minister and then detonated an explosive vest hidden under her dress.
Female terrorists have been successful partly because they are less likely to be closely searched due to cultural taboos in some countries, and because security agencies often assume terrorists are young males.
Ms. Usama said al-Qaeda got the idea from Palestinian terrorist groups, which have sent female recruits on suicide bombing missions in Israel, several of them in the past 14 months. Palestinians call them the "angels of death."
Ms. Usama's answers to the questions put to her by the Arab newspaper's reporter suggested many of the details of the new "sisters" brigade had not been worked out.
"Our intention is to establish camps in places where there are a large number of mujahid [holy warrior] women. We do not know where it is going to happen so we are not in a position to say we shall create camps here or there."
sbell@nationalpost.com
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