Russia’s “Black Widows”: Organization Behind Sensation

This article analyzes female suicide bombings in Russia in order to prove that suicide terrorism in the largest of the post-Soviet states is an organizational rather than trauma-driven phenomenon.While female suicide bombers have so far used conventional explosives in their attacks, one can imagine how much havoc a suicide terrorist or terrorists could wreak if they got their hands on radioactive materials to make a dirty bomb, or penetrated a nuclear facility to sabotage it.

Russia’s “Black Widows”: Organization Behind Sensation

By Nabi Abdullaev

The bombing of a crowded bus –  allegedly carried out by a female native of Russia’s restive province of Dagestan  in the southern city of Volgograd in October 2013– has become a grim reminder of how difficult it  can be to prevent acts of suicide terrorism. Secret services apparently had 30-year-old Naida Asiyalova on their radar screen for months, yet failed to stop this militant Islamist’s wife from deploying from Dagestan to Volgograd to kill six and injure more than 30 on October 21, 2013.

While Asiyalova used conventional explosives in her attack, one can imagine how much havoc a suicide terrorist or terrorists could wreak if they got their hands on radioactive materials to make a dirty bomb, or penetrated a nuclear facility to sabotage it.

My calculations, based on publicly available data, show that 48 female suicide bombers have staged a total of 25 attacks since June 2000. These attacks have claimed a total of 847 lives, averaging 65 lives a year.

“Black widows” – as sensationalist journalists have dubbed female suicide bombers – helped the North Caucasus-based Islamist insurgency move to the forefront of the global jihad in the early 2000s. As insurgency has spread across the region, they have proven nearly unstoppable, as one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of terrorist groups operating in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other republics of the North Caucasus.

The authorities' mixed record in combating this form of terrorism, ranging from helplessness to temporary success, can generate both anxiety and hope as Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi, a city that is located only a few hundred kilometers away from the heart of the unrelenting unrest in the North Caucasus.

While the mainstream analyses of female suicide bombers by Russian and Western scholars have largely attributed the phenomenon to the psychological trauma wrought on individual women by the brutality of conflict, there is growing evidence to suggest that the attackers are high-visibility end players in organized terror campaigns.

Female Suicide Bombings in Russia: Geographical Shift

Notably, there were no female suicide attacks during Russia’s first military campaign in Chechnya in 1994-1996, in spite of the brutal character of that war, in which tens of thousands of civilians died.  The first such attack occurred in Chechnya less than a year after the second military campaign began there in 1999, even though that second war was far less brutal and indiscriminate than the first.

My research shows that 15 out of the 16 attacks that took place between the first attack of 2000 and the siege of the school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan in Sept. 2004 featured Chechen women acting as suicide bombers. Eight of these attacks happened in Chechnya, six in Moscow, and one in North Ossetia (Beslan). The identities of almost all the women, except for several participants in the 2002 Dubrovka theater hostage crisis in Moscow, have been disclosed. Russian officials identified them all as being natives of Chechnya.

Officials have not disclosed the identity of a female suicide bomber behind the 16^th attack – which took place in North Ossetia in June 2003 and targeted Russian air force pilots riding a bus.

There was a relative lull in female suicide bombings after the Beslan hostage-taking, from 2004 to 2008.

Then, a female suicide bomber struck in North Ossetia in 2008. The identity of that bomber was not disclosed.

The last reported female suicide bombing related to Chechnya took place in 2009, with the attacker being the only casualty.

According to publicly available information, there have been no instances of female suicide bombers striking in or originating from Chechnya since then. Yet, it would be hard to believe that the despair and trauma of potential bombers in Chechnya disappeared during this period.

However, there was one female suicide bombing in Ingushetia, which neighbors Chechnya, in 2010. 2010 was also the year that female suicide bombings started up as a systemic campaign in Dagestan, which also neighbors Chechnya. My research, based on publicly available sources, indicates that six out of eight bombers in the ensuing seven attacks – from 2010 to the latest bombing in October 2013 - were from Dagestan, Two of those eight were ethnic Russians who had converted to Islam.

Hence, a clear geographic pattern has emerged: the sources and targets of female suicide terrorism have both shifted from Chechnya to Dagestan.

One possible explanation for this could be that, in the Russian state’s intense onslaught against the insurgency in Chechnya following Beslan, those who had the organizational knowledge and skills related to using women in suicide bombing missions were simply wiped out.

But several years later, these skills and knowledge appeared in Dagestan.

Another argument in favor of the organizational factor being the key to the phenomenon is the fact that attacks by female suicide bombers often come clustered in time, like the twin bombings of airborne planes in 2004 and on the Moscow metro in 2010.

High-profile attacks have also taken place well outside Chechnya and Dagestan, and were   integrated into bigger terrorist operations, such as the Beslan and Dubrovka hostage-taking raids, which also supports the idea of an organization behind the attacks capitalizing on the bombers’ despair and channeling it strategically.

Interestingly, other groups that use female suicide bombers, such as terrorists in Palestine, turned to this tactic after Israeli security forces made it nearly impossible for male terrorists to get into Israel. In the North Caucasus, women were deployed in suicide attacks from the very beginning, suggesting that it was one of the tactics initially selected by the terrorists.

Role of Religion

One possible explanation for the absence of suicide bombers during the first Chechen war of 1994-1996, despite both its brutality and the proliferation of such tactics in other hot spots, could be that from the Chechen side it was mostly waged by secular separatists.

The second conflict in Chechnya, which began in 1999, saw Islamists, who included many jihadists from Arab countries, seize the operational initiative on the Chechen side. These jihadists imported effective terrorist tactics from other fronts of their global jihad, including the use of women in suicide attacks.

There is scant evidence to suggest that the suicide bombers of that second campaign were actually thoroughly indoctrinated in radical Islam, even though the organizers of such attacks tried hard to create such an impression among the local constituencies.

One such propaganda attempt culminated in the recording and dissemination of a video by 19 female bombers who went on to participate in the Dubrovka hostage-taking raid in Moscow in 2002. The women, clad in black, gave lengthy speeches, in which they framed their future mission as a retaliatory act against president Putin for his war on Muslims. The statement was broadcast by the al-Jazeera TV network.

However, my research shows that in most of the other cases, there is no firm evidence that religious indoctrination was used to prepare female suicide bombers for their deadly mission, even though many of them had familial and/or personal ties to Islamist rebels.

It is worth noting here that using women in suicide bombings is not a purely religious phenomenon. Several secular groups, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Kurdish Workers’ Party also used this tactic.

There is very little information in the public domain about how the North Caucasus female suicide bombers have prepared for their missions. Therefore, it is yet to be established to what extent religion was used in turning them into suicide machines and to what extent it is part of a propaganda ploy to portray the cause as part of the global Islamist effort against “infidels.”

Strategy Behind the Tactics

There are several considerations that may explain the prominence of female suicide bombers in the North Caucasus militants’ warfare.

First, suicide bombings are effective, as demonstrated by the death toll that I have referred to above and the traumatizing impact such attacks have had on the public in Russia.

Second, it is sensational. The media, a crucial tool for the terrorist groups to get their message across, is easily sucked in by the dramatic story focused on these women, which has a force-multiplying effect on viewers.

Third, female suicide bombers are all but unstoppable. High profile attacks by female suicide bombers cast doubt on the Russian government’s ability to protect its citizens, although the war in Chechnya – for many years the main security threat in Russia – is long over.

Fourth, as demonstrated by the Beslan and the Dubrovka hostage-taking raids, the terrorists have developed an innovative tactic of including female suicide bombers in larger commando units on complex missions, dramatically impeding the government’s ability to tackle the hostage crises. It is more difficult to negotiate safe retreats or other concessions appealing to the terrorists’ interests if, for some of them, their goal is to kill themselves while inflicting maximum damage on their foe.

Fifth, “black widows” have become a high-value franchise, and it would be strategically unwise for terrorists to give them up entirely. The fear they inspire, at least in the immediate aftermath of an attack, is so strong that there have been reports of Russian travelers refusing to fly in the same plane with women wearing a veil, as chosen by some observant Muslims.

Sixth, there is a steady pool of potential recruits for suicide missions. The vast majority of female suicide attackers were rebels’ common-law wives. This is, in part, because if their husbands are killed by Russian security forces, these women have little chance of going back to their normal lives. Returning home would put their families at risk.  With limited options, some of these women choose to sacrifice themselves for the cause.

Threat of Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism Multiplied by Shakhids

The risk that those who organize suicide terrorist attacks will eventually attempt to use their organizational skills to attempt an attack on a nuclear facility to significantly increase damage to the Russian state is far from negligible.

North Caucasus-based networks’ capabilities for traditional guerilla warfare and conventional terrorist attacks have diminished since the beginning of Russia’s second campaign in Chechnya. As these networks achieve little in trying to force the Russian authorities into making concessions through conventional means, they may be inclined to try unconventional means, such as an act of radiological or nuclear terrorism.

Of course, terrorists targeting a high-security nuclear facility in Russian would have to be prepared to die in their mission. This is not an obstacle to suicide terrorists.

North Caucasus separatists and terrorists have a history of trying either to penetrate Russia’s nuclear facilities or to obtain nuclear materials.

Then Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev warned that his fighters might attack nuclear plants in Russia in 1992 to discourage Moscow from trying to counter his republic’s bid for independence. He issued a similar threat in 1995 when the military campaign was already underway within the republic.

That year, the rebel warlord Shamil Basayev – who later organized the attack on the school in Beslan – threatened the Russian government with exploding a crude radioactive device in Moscow. Tipped off by him, a Russian television crew then found a container with cesium-137 in a Moscow park.

Chechen fighters removed several containers of radioactive materials from the Grozny branch of Russia’s Radon nuclear waste collection enterprise prior to the seizure of the facility by federal troops in January 2000, Russia’s Profil magazine reported in March 2000, quoting its sources in the Russian Defense Ministry.

In 2002, several Russian media outlets, including state news agency RIA Novosti, quoted Russian military officials as saying that a senior Chechen rebel commander and a former naval officer who had served on a submarine were planning to hijack a Russian nuclear submarine.

The same year, Russian media reported the arrest of a senior officer guarding Kalininskaya nuclear power station in the Tver region. He was suspected of leaking secret information about the station to natives of Chechnya.

According to Russia’s PIR-Center think tank, which tracks security issues, in the 1990s and 2000s there were about 20 reported cases of Chechen terrorist groups trying to penetrate Russia’s nuclear facilities or get hold of nuclear materials.

It should be noted that, unlike the early years of Chechen female suicide bombings, when they were part of a bigger separatist strategy, no political demands are currently being articulated by the terrorists in the North Caucasus.

This may mean a shift to another stage of confrontation, in which terrorists set for themselves the goal of wreaking maximum destruction on the enemy. Islamic radicalism that evokes narratives of post-mortem gratification in paradise for falling in this noble fight for the faith is a convenient ideology to back up this shift.

Dismantling the Threat

If these arguments hold true, Russian officials need to focus on hunting down those who play a central role in orchestrating female suicide bombings as a tool in North Caucasus terrorism.

Because the government tends to be relatively non-transparent in its anti-terror strategies, it is hard to know what efforts it is exerting to this end. But its cruder and more heavy-handed approaches have had mixed success.

Over the past dozen years, many of the state's tactics have focused on controversial punishments against perpetrators' families – like demolishing their homes or depriving them of the right to retrieve the attacker's body for burial.

In a similar vein, President Vladimir Putin in November 2013 signed a bill that would force relatives of terrorists to cover the costs of damage caused by attacks.

When it comes to female suicide bombers, however, there are multiple accounts of perpetrators cutting ties with their families before a mission, undermining the impact of such measures or triggering even greater discontent if they are introduced.

In Chechnya, the Kremlin's success in stamping out suicide bombings has been linked in part to its appointment of a reliable and feared strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, under whose rule explicitly separatist and jihadist sentiments have been ruthlessly quashed.

Dagestan, however, may be a harder nut to crack.

Unlike Chechnya, the republic is neither mono-ethnic nor depleted by years of war. Its complex clan networks, often based on ethnicity, have led to an idiosyncratic model of checks and balances. As a result, the Kremlin cannot invest a single leader with near-absolute power, as it has done with Kadyrov, since this would trigger widespread discontent and countervailing alliances among the groups who feel sidelined.

To make matters thornier, Dagestan's militant groups - whose agendas range from personal vendetta to protection racket to Islamism - often play a role in the republic's murky power politics. Many local strongmen cooperate with them when it suits their purposes - a problem referred to publicly by the Kremlin's recently appointed local leader, Ramazan Abdulatipov.

With such complex power dynamics, federal authorities face a huge challenge in trying to stop the organizational machinery behind the region's suicide-bomber franchise.

Nabi Abdullaev is the head of the foreign-language news service at RIA Novosti. He is a native of Dagestan where he worked for several years as a journalist before moving to Moscow. Abdullaev holds a graduate degree from Harvard Kennedy School.