What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?

By ROBERT A. PAPE, LINDSEY O'ROURKE and JENNA McDERMIT
Published: March 30, 2010

ALMOST every month for the past two years, Chechen suicide bombers have struck. Their targets can be anything from Russian soldiers to Chechen police officers to the innocent civilians who were killed on the subway in Moscow this week. We all know the horror that people willing to kill themselves can inflict. But do we really understand what drives young women and men to strap explosives on their bodies and deliberately kill themselves in order to murder dozens of people going about their daily lives?

Chechen suicide attackers do not fit popular stereotypes, contrary to the Russian government’s efforts to pigeonhole them. For years, Moscow has routinely portrayed Chechen bombers as Islamic extremists, many of them foreign, who want to make Islam the world’s dominant religion. Yet however much Russia may want to convince the West that this battle is part of a global war on terrorism, the facts about who becomes a Chechen suicide attacker — male or female — reveal otherwise.

The three of us, in our work for the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, have analyzed every Chechen suicide attack since they began in 2000, 42 separate incidents involving 63 people who killed themselves. Many Chechen separatists are Muslim, but few of the suicide bombers profess religious motives. The majority are male, but a huge fraction — over 40 percent — are women. Although foreign suicide attackers are not unheard of in Chechnya, of the 42 for whom we can determine place of birth, 38 were from the Caucasus. Something is driving Chechen suicide bombers, but it is hardly global jihad.

As we have discovered in our research on Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, suicide terrorist campaigns are almost always a last resort against foreign military occupation. Chechnya is a powerful demonstration of this phenomenon at work.

In the 1990s, the rebels kicked out tens of thousands of Russian troops who had been sent to the region to prevent Chechnya, a republic within the Russian Federation, from declaring independence. In 1999, the Russians came back — this time with more than 90,000 troops — and waged a well-documented scorched-earth campaign, killing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 civilians out of a population of about 1 million. Ordinary guerrilla tactics and hostage-taking — the keys to ousting the Russians the first time — now got the rebels nowhere. New tactics were employed and women were central from the start.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/opinion/31pape.html?pagewanted=all

They witnessed the slaughter of thousands of their men folk. Killing only leads to more killing.

the racism against them in major Russian cities and there is enough anger for women to feel also. There's no reason to think women would not be as angry.

In Moscow after Sept '03 I saw the cops rousting dark folks out of the markets just because they were dark.

The Russians have been kicking the Chechens since WWI. They were one of the people Stalin most despised.

IME, while men are more likely to commit casual or even habitual violence, a women intent on serious violence is often more ruthless an unrestrained. Not claiming its cultural, genetic, or something else, just my observation over the years.

Or that their husbands or children were killed in front of them. Or all of the above.

And since the Chechen wars have decimated the male populations of Chechnya and Ingushetya, the adult population is mostly women.