Looking for a Cause: Iraqi Women Suicide Bombers
Rollcall please: Hanadi Jaradat, Wafa Idris, Andalib Sulaiman, Ayat al-Akhras, Khava Barayeva, Elza Gazuyeva, Maryam Sharipova, Zulikhan Elikzhiyeva…
I love how people are recently all up in arms over this supposedly new wave of violence perpetuated by women. The rash of suicide bombings in Iraq, as though this sort of thing is a new phenomena, the whole outcry from the “West” is universal: “Oh, women are killing people!” Of course they’re killing people, it’s not like women have all of a sudden decided to become warriors en masse in the 21st century.
Assia Djebar writes about “women with bombs strapped to their bellies.” in her novel Women of Algiers in their Apartments and how women after the Algerian war for independence were sidelined and left as opium addicts and prostitutes. The notion of women as actors in “independence” movements is so not old, nor obviously is it exclusively “Eastern” or “Islamic” and the cause and effect are not mutually exclusive by any means, just different perpetrators at the outset.
To be as candid as I will probably ever get, women are pissed-off, desperate, and well, what would you do if you had no options, your livelihood was gone, and you were quite literally shoveling your way out of a hole? The obvious answer is that you’d fight back. So women choose suicide missions, what else are they going to do?
I don’t condone it, I don’t want to pretend like I intimately understand it, but on some level, the most base level of common womanhood, I empathise wholly.
August 8, 2008 at 9:42 pm
You have confused me with your post.
You list a miriad of reasons that seemingly legitimise Iriqi Women Suicide Bombers. Then you finish with you don’t pretend to understand it. So which is it?
It grieves my heart that these women have to (as you say) dig themselves out of a hole but to kill themselves and others is reprehensable. They are committing the very act that they abhore!
You ask “what else are the going to do?” Fight back against their opressors! Wouldn’t it make more sense to go down fighting for your cause than to kill yourself and others thereby perpetuating the very violance you decry?
August 8, 2008 at 9:49 pm
I said I empathise, that’s different than sympathising with it. I can empathise because at the deepest level of womanhood you can understand the sentiments, but you can never sympathise with them because you’ve never been in that precise situation. I’ve never had to dig myself out of a crater or see my family murdered or lost a son or seen my country and my livelihood leveled by a foreign entity. It’s a matter of semantics and life experience.
They are fighting back against their oppressors through this means. The only reason that they have resorted to suicide bombings is because either the venues are not available or they have exhausted all other resources for fighting against their oppressors. In a highly-charged, patriarchal society, the methodologies for fighting oppression are not exactly vast and in a war zone, well, the existing patriarchal structure is compounded and reinforced with a closed society.
It’s horrifying that they have to commit these acts that they themselves abhor. I don’t ever want to say that I am legitimising suicide bombers, but it’s hard not to when you see many of the facets that make-up the “Why?”
August 8, 2008 at 9:52 pm
So by using the term “their operessors” you are meaning the US lead Coalition forces?
August 8, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Well, it was the US Coalition Forces who helped to create the power vacuum in Iraq and destroyed the infrastructure, so I would say yes.
Generally speaking however, the suicide missions be they against the French colonisers of Algeria, against the IDF, or against Coalition Forces in Iraq, were/are carried-out against a military presence (i.e. a tangible oppressor).
In an abstract sense, they are fighting back against their oppressors in terms of subverting the patriarchy by becoming “warriors” themselves and taking on roles that would normally be filled by men. It’s a sort of violent way of asserting their presence.
At the end of the war however, they will be relegated back to their “traditional” social roles, regardless of how they participated in “liberating” the country from its oppressor.
August 8, 2008 at 10:21 pm
How sad for everyone.
August 8, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I know, it breaks my heart. I have a friend who is a professor at Baghdad University and she was the first one to send me information on the suicide bombings. I couldn’t believe that she was telling ME about it, it was just unreal.
They are so acutely aware that every step may be their last. I remember her telling me about a sniper taking aim at her head and the bullet landing at her feet and she just calmly said to me, “It wasn’t my death hour. I just went inside my house, had a cup of tea, and took a nap.” It was like she was just on autopilot, so scary.