What's the reason behind rising number of female suicide bombers?

Pakistan is known to be the hub of suicide attacks and the recent one where a well-educated woman blew herself off at Karachi University was no surprise. 

30-year-old Shari Baloch alias Bramsh who hailed from the Turbat Region of Baluchistan and had a well-to-do family including her husband as a doctor and two young kids took the extreme step. She saw her Baloch brothers and sisters suffer through the extreme hostilities of the Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for a long and took this ultimate step. 

Although this was the first one in the ongoing Baloch insurgency but not the first one in Pakistan. There have been plenty of such attacks in our western neighbour in the past 10-12 years.

On December 25, 2010, a Burka-clad woman reportedly from Tehrik-E Taliban Pakistan (TTP) entered the food distribution centre of the world food program in the Khar area of Bajaur agency and blew herself off killing over 47 & injuring over 100. 

After exactly six months, an Uzbek couple carried out another suicide attack in Kulachi police station in Dera Ismail Khan killing over 10 policemen & injuring scores. Like earlier, this time also the attack was carried out by TTP which was earlier not known to employ women suicide bombers. The same year on August 11, 2011, other women fidayee carried out a suicide bombing in Peshawar at a check post.

Not only in Pakistan but in other parts of the world, the incidents of women suicide bombing are increasing rapidly. There has been a significant jump in such terror acts since we saw the assassination of our own Ex-Prime Minister Mr Rajiv Gandhi using a female suicide bomber of LTTE in 1991. 

However, after this lone incident, almost all women suicide bombing incidents in the world were from Islamic terror organisations.

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Female suicide bombers are an easy bet for various terror organisations because of various reasons. First, they are easy to transport and are largely unknown to the security forces. Secondly, being a female, they have bigger freedom of movement too, and thirdly, the frisking of these women suicide bombers is difficult especially if they are from the Islamic community in the name of religion and modesty. These women suicide bombers wear a traditional Islamic Burkha or veil and it is very easy to hide suicide vests, explosive belts, or even firearms inside a Burkha without getting detected. 

In places like Pakistan or the middle east, there are not enough women in the police & security forces to cope with the threat posed by women terrorists.

As a result, the success rate of these female suicide bombers is almost 100% which is prompting terrorist groups worldwide to adopt this way of creating fear in minds of people. This is creating an environment of very high risk in the world and analysing this is important. A big question is to understand the dynamics behind a well-to-do woman becoming a suicide bomber. Several aspects need to be understood to mitigate this risk and counter it as well.

Religious factors

When in 2002, Wafa Idris blew herself up in Jerusalem, she was praised heavily by the media of the entire Arab World. Even the high-ranking spiritual leaders of Saudi Arabia justified her actions declaring them in line with the religious books of Islam. In August 2011, the high-ranking Saudi Islamic Council also gave a go-ahead for women suicide bombers which is in a way legalising it. Similarly, in other places like Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Syria & Central Asian Countries, women suicide bombers were eulogized wholeheartedly not only by political leaders but religious leaders too. In the case of the Islamic world, we see a society where women's education is taboo & is limited to religious ones only, religious factors make things easy for terror organisations to recruit a female suicide bomber.
 
Forced Indoctrination

In January 2010, Meena Gul, an 11-year-old Afghan refugee escaped from a mujahideen camp in Bajaur. She told the police that she was part of an indoctrination camp where young girls like her are kept and religiously brainwashed to become suicide bombers. Over the next two years, security forces recovered more than half a dozen such girls aged 8 to 12 years who were part of such camps. Unfortunately, all of them were in Pakistan. Intelligence agencies reported that TTP recruited small Afghan girls from various refugee camps & kept them in such indoctrination camps with the sole purpose to carry out suicide attacks. The number of these camps was reported to be more than half a dozen which were spread all over the tribal belt of Pakistan.

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Family Factors

There have been cases where a woman has turned into a suicide bomber of fidayee to revenge for the death of her family members or the close ones. Surprisingly, nearly all of the women suicide bombers faced either the death of their near ones or suffered some kind of childhood trauma including harassment by the security forces. They already have a sense of revenge for a personal loss or to regain the family name. Such actions leave a mark on their minds and terrorist organisations take the help of such incidents to radicalise them.
 
Psychological factor 

In a patriarchal society where women are suppressed and harassed for ages, such actions present an opportunity for women to prove their metal in front of the male-dominated world. While she thinks that she can not become a hero in her entire lifetime, it is better to be called a martyr after death and leave an impression on the men. They seek empowerment in becoming suicide bombers. Most of these women want to escape the life of monotony & to equalise the male society and achieve fame and thus fall prey to it.

Mitigation of this risk is very much important and even in the case of India, it is important. There have been cases in Kerala where some women were radicalised to join Islamic State and there were women terror groups like “Dukhtaan E Millat” in Jammu and Kashmir so Indian agencies must be ultra-vigilant. While the first and foremost responsibility lies with our security and intelligence agencies to keep a vigil on such activities in India other factors are important too. 

Society and religious leaders must ensure that correct religious education reaches the people of this country, high ranking clerics should condemn this and rate this as anti-Islamic. Their Fatwas will help in countering this. Similarly, the media also must play a vital role in creating a narrative against suicide bombing. Their reach combined with the fatwas will help counter this trend. This is important for our national security.