Can Boko Haram’s strength be gauged by the gender of their suicide bombers?
The government says the terrorists have been defeated, but over 100 civilians were killed this week
By Maham Javaid
The militants arrived in the village of Dalori, Nigeria in cars and on motorbikes on Saturday night. They started by shooting indiscriminately, then they set at least 300 houses on fire — many with occupants still inside. Witnesses say militants snatched their children and ran off with them into the bush. The pandemonium caused the villagers and the occupants of a nearby refugee camp to take shelter under a huge tree. It was then that a female suicide bomber sneaked into the crowd and detonated explosives. During the course of the four-hour attack, two more female suicide bombers detonated explosives, altogether killing over 100 people.
In the last two years the frequency of attacks by female suicide bombers in Nigeria has grown exponentially. Before 2014, there was not a single reported case of a female suicide bomber, in 2014 there were 8, and the next year there were 53. “The number of female suicide bombers used by Boko Haram in Nigeria is larger than the number used by any other organization at any other time,” said Scott Stewart, the vice president of tactical analysis at Stratfor, a global intelligence and advisory firm.
There is nothing new about terrorist organizations or separatist movements employing female suicide bombers to do their bidding. Scholars do say, however, that there is a common thread linking female suicide bombings from across the world. “There is a historical correlation between an increase in female suicide bombers and the downfall of a terrorist group. We have seen it before. Take Al Qaeda in Iraq as an example,” said Stewart.
The first suicide bombing by a woman took place in 1985, during the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. A 16-year-old member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) blew herself up next to an Israeli convoy in Lebanon, killing two Israeli soldiers.
Six years later, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a member of the Tamil Tigers, a separatist militant group based in Sri Lanka, killed Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister of India. Posing as a Gandhi supporter, Rajaratnam placed a garland around his neck and then as she bent down to touch his feet she detonated the explosives around her body, killing Gandhi and 14 others. The Tamil Tigers were famous for suicide bombings, and yet Stewart says “the Tigers didn’t use as many female suicide bombers during their entire existence as Boko Haram has in last two years.”
The early adopters of female suicide bombers included the Tigers or the SSNP, groups that identified with socialism. Organizations that fall under the broad umbrella of radical Islamists or jihadists brought female suicide bombers into the fold much later. Between 2000 and 2004, female Chechen suicide bombers, often referred to as “Black Widows,” attacked Russian military targets in Chechnya and civilians in Russia.
In December 2015, Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian president, announced that “the country has technically won the war against Boko Haram,” since they’ve been pushed out of cities and towns and can no longer carry out conventional attacks, resorting instead to using improvised explosive devices.
“Their [Boko Haram’s] desperation has grown and this has led to the dramatic increase of female suicide bombers,” Stewart said. The desperation, he explained, comes from the fact that within the traditional jihadi realm a woman is not seen as a combatant. He adds that there might also be logistical factors at play: The increase in suicide attacks would reduce Boko Haram’s camp size, which will increase mobility and decrease visibility.
Even if Boko Haram is employing female suicide bombers as a reaction to being pushed out of Nigeria’s main cities, this hardly means that the organization has been destroyed. “While the group has definitely weakened and turned into an insurgency, who’s to say that this insurgency, accompanied by many similar attacks as the one we saw on Saturday, won’t continue for many years to come?” asked Stewart.
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