Lone Wolf Terrorism

by Jeffrey D. Simon

  Just like Leila Khaled after her first hijacking, Julienne Busic, who was born in the United States, was viewed as a heroine by many people in Croatia and other parts of the world. This was yet another example of the famous slogan: “One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.” Busic had poets write to her, and Croatian television, newspapers, and magazines interviewed her after her release from prison.9 Interestingly, both she and Khaled did not consider themselves to be terrorists. Khaled told an interviewer, “My work as a freedom fighter has given me happiness; you identify yourself with the struggle. It is the difference between a freedom fighter and an ordinary person. As a Palestinian I wouldn't be happy with myself unless I was a freedom fighter. I am glad I have done so much.”10 Busic said, “I could never consider myself a terrorist. I'm just not a terrorist. I'm not a criminal, I mean in so far as I have no criminal nature, no criminal mind.”11

  There is another similarity between these two female hijackers who had very different backgrounds and causes for which they were fighting. Both Khaled and Busic fell victim to a variation of the “Stockholm Syndrome.” The term originated with a bank robbery and hostage incident in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1973. The hostage episode lasted five days, with the hostages gradually viewing their captors as their protectors, fearing that a police rescue attempt might result in their deaths. When the gunmen finally surrendered, the hostages were afraid that the police might shoot the gunmen, so the hostages formed a protective shield around them as they all came out of the bank. Some of the hostages said later that they felt no hatred toward their captors. They felt that their captors, by not killing them, had given them their lives back. And one of the hostages actually wound up marrying one of the gunmen while he was serving his prison sentence. Therefore, whenever there is a hostage situation and the hostages, after the ordeal is over, do not condemn their captors, they are described by the media and other observers as having fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome. However, this syndrome can affect both the hostages and the hostage takers. The three basic phases of the Stockholm Syndrome are positive feelings of the hostages toward their captors, negative feelings of the hostages toward the police or other government authorities, and the reciprocation of the positive feelings by the captors.12

  Julienne Busic had positive feelings for those she was holding captive on the plane. “I felt like I was experiencing sort of a reverse Stockholm Syndrome,” she recalled years later. “It was like I identified with the passengers, too, to the extent that I believed that we were all on the same side.” One former hostage told reporters that Busic “acted almost like a stewardess walking up and down the aisle talking politely to people and calming them.”13 After she was arrested and was in the airport control tower in Paris, she realized that she had in her possession her husband Zvonko's address book. She did not want the authorities to discover this, but she didn't know how to dispose of it. When she saw the released passengers and crew walk by her in the tower, she came up with an idea. “I go up to the steward…and I said, ‘Listen, you've got to hide this for me! Because this is Zvonko's address book!’ And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I was so upset. Because you know we had gone through all this and we were all one big happy family. And now he wouldn't do that.”14

  Khaled also identified with her captives. Before she hijacked her first plane in 1969, she was waiting in the lounge to board the aircraft when she saw a little girl playing with her sister. “For the first time I realized that I would be endangering her life,” Khaled said. “If the plane blew up during our hijack, or if it was shot down by Israeli anti-aircraft fire, then those innocent children would die.”15 Khaled was also troubled by a conversation she had with a Greek man before she boarded the plane. He told her that he lived in the United States and was returning to Greece for the first time in many years to visit his mother. This reminded her of separations in her own family when she was growing up. “I knew very well what it meant to be away from home, from your mother and sisters, and I was thinking about this while this man talked to me.” After the hijacking was over, she saw him sitting and crying. She told him, “Now you are OK. We will send your mother a telegram, and she can meet you.”16

  The experiences of Khaled and Busic illustrate the emotional effects that a hijacking or other type of hostage episode can have on a female member of a terrorist group. It may well be that some male hijackers have similar experiences, but perhaps there is a “softer” side of the female psyche that may have played a factor, in addition to the Stockholm Syndrome, in these two women identifying with their captives. However, female terrorists can at times be as tough, if not tougher, than their male colleagues. There have been some instances reported in which male terrorists, when faced with a confrontation with police or other counterterrorist forces, hesitated for a moment before they fired their weapons, whereas the female terrorists shot at once. Advice, therefore, reportedly given to European counterterrorist forces by the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) was to “shoot the women first.”17

  Another example of the emotional effects a terrorist operation can have on a female extremist can be seen in the case of Susan Albrecht, who was a member of the German Red Army Faction (RAF), which was originally known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Her godfather was Jurgen Ponto, the chairman of Dresdner Bank and the target of a planned RAF kidnapping in 1977. The RAF wanted to take advantage of Albrecht's personal relationship with Ponto in order to gain access to his house. Their objective was to kidnap Ponto and then demand the release of RAF members in prison.

  Albrecht, however, refused to help. She told the group that she felt close to her godfather and wouldn't want to harm him in any way. The RAF then applied enormous psychological pressure on Albrecht to get her to participate. As one RAF member pointed out, because she refused to take part in the operation based on emotional reasons, the group accused her of having no political identity and no loyalty to her imprisoned comrades, who would supposedly be freed in return for the release of the kidnapped Ponto. Since the RAF was a small group, isolated from society, it was difficult for Albrecht to continue to voice her opposition to participating in the kidnapping plan. The group was basically her life, her main frame of reference for the entire world.

  Psychological pressure was applied over the course of several days, with different RAF members taking turns challenging Albrecht's reasons for not wanting to help in the plot. Finally, the group pressure was too much, and Albrecht agreed to take part in the kidnapping along with two other RAF members. But it all went terribly wrong. One of the RAF members killed Ponto when the group tried to kidnap him at his house. In the aftermath of the killing, Albrecht had a nervous breakdown. She was extremely depressed and no longer capable of performing any functions for the terrorist organization. As one of the RAF members stated, “For days on end, she was shaken by incessant crying spells. She had no strength left. She had broken down completely and should, under normal circumstances, have been hospitalized.” The RAF arranged for her transfer to East Germany, where she assumed a new name, Ingrid Jaeger, got married, and had a child. She was finally arrested in East Berlin in 1990 after the collapse of the Communist regime.18

  The RAF was among the terrorist groups of that period that were very female friendly, with a woman, Ulrike Meinhof, having cofounded the group in 1970 (along with Andreas Baader). Meinhof was a left-wing journalist before she helped form the terrorist group. Her name “became associated with the whole era of anti-imperialist protest turned to violence.”19 The RAF was involved in hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations, and other widely publicized terrorist acts. Women were believed at one point to constitute approximately 50 percent of the RAF membership and about 80 percent of the group's supporters.20 One scholar, however, argues that, for the most part, women only served in support roles in the RAF, despite the fact that its cofounder was a woman.21

  During its existence, the RAF demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to changing circum
stances in order to survive and remain relevant. The group's initial targets were capitalists and other symbols of the industrialized states, with the goal being to bring about a Marxist-Maoist revolution. In the early 1980s, the group switched its main focus away from business targets that represented capitalism to those representing the US military and NATO. The placement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s was highly unpopular among the public, and it led to large-scale, nonviolent protests in many countries. The RAF, therefore, decided to take advantage of this situation by targeting NATO and US military personnel and facilities for terrorist attacks. This did not, however, result in any significant increase in the number of new recruits to the group or in a rallying among the masses to its cause. Therefore, when the Cold War began to wind down in the late 1980s, the RAF had to find a new strategy. As a result, it basically returned to its original cause, focusing once again on capitalist symbols. In 1989, the RAF assassinated Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank, and in 1991, it assassinated Detlev Rohweder, a German government official who was responsible for economic reforms that led to the loss of thousands of jobs.22

  By 1998, however, the RAF announced that it was officially disbanding, ending more than two decades of terrorist activities. Its leadership stated in a seven-thousand-word communiqué that they had made a strategic error in not building up a political organization alongside the armed one, and as a result, “the urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now history.” It was a remarkable statement, because not many terrorist groups issue official declarations announcing an end to their activity due to their own mistakes in strategy and ideology. As the group acknowledged, “The lack of a political-social organization was a decisive mistake by the RAF. It wasn't the only mistake, but it's one important reason why the RAF could not become a stronger liberation project.” The influence of women in the RAF could also be seen in one of the passages from the final communiqué: “The marketing of people and the violence in the home and on the streets, these are the violence of suppression, the social coldness against others, the violence against women—all of these are expressions of patriarchal and racist conditions.”23

  Women were prominent in other terrorist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Red Brigades in Italy and the Weather Underground in the United States. The latter was originally known as the “Weathermen,” but the name was changed to avoid alienating feminist supporters.24 In one shocking episode during that period, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped and then joined the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States in 1974.

  By the 1980s, however, the terrorism of the leftist revolutionary groups was replaced by the emergence of a seemingly more frightening wave of terrorism—namely, religious extremists bent on changing governments and societies to their own fundamentalist beliefs.25 Whereas secular terrorists usually have self-imposed constraints on the level of violence they perpetrate (since they are concerned with not alienating their supporters in the general population and do not want to create an overwhelming response by the targeted country that could result in the elimination of the group), religious extremists march to a different beat. Believing that God is on one's side and that one will be rewarded in the afterlife for committing horrendous crimes on earth is a powerful incentive to keep on fighting, no matter what the consequences.26

  The emergence of religious terrorists, particularly Islamic extremists, coincided with the growth in suicide terrorist attacks. Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Shiite militant group, burst onto the scene in Lebanon in 1983 with a series of suicide bombings, including bombings that targeted the US embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut.27 But, while many people today still equate suicide attacks with religious extremists, it was actually a secular group in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), that was responsible for the most suicide attacks in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time the group was defeated by the Sri Lankan army in 2009, after more than twenty-five years of violence, it had committed approximately two hundred suicide attacks. The hostilities pitted the minority Tamils, who are Hindu, against the ruling majority Sinhalese, who are Buddhist. The conflict was a secular one, however, with LTTE's goal being to create a separate, nonreligious Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. LTTE had no religious or cultural restrictions on using females for their militancy. Women, therefore, committed between 30 and 40 percent of the suicide attacks that LTTE was responsible for. The group was so dedicated to the use of suicide bombings that it formed a special squad for these individuals, known as the “Black Tigers,” and had an annual ceremony to celebrate the squad's accomplishments. The dedication of the group to women's participation could also be seen in LTTE's website, which had separate sections extolling the virtues of the female comrades. Female members of the Black Tigers were responsible for some of LTTE's most high-profile attacks, including the assassination in 1991 of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

  Another secular group that used women as suicide terrorists was the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), an organization that was very active in the 1990s. Between 1996 and 1999 alone, the PKK, which is comprised of Turkish Kurds fighting to establish an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey, carried out twenty-one suicide attacks or attempted suicide attacks, with women being the suicide terrorists in eleven out of the fifteen successful attacks and in three out of six attacks that were intercepted by Turkish authorities.28

  Other terrorist groups that included women in their suicide attacks were the Palestinian al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, and the Chechen rebel movement. All these groups were secular and therefore did not have any religious proscriptions against using women for terrorist activities. The emergence of female Chechen suicide terrorists gave rise to the term “black widows.” Two deadly wars in Chechnya in the 1990s (Chechens were fighting for independence from Russia) left tens of thousands of casualties. Many Chechen women lost their husbands or other relatives in the wars, so once these women began taking part in suicide attacks in Russia, sometimes dressed head-to-toe in black, the popular notion was that they were doing so to exact revenge. Among the female suicide attacks were bombings of planes, a subway system, and a music festival. In addition, women were part of Chechen teams that seized a Moscow theater in 2002 and a Beslan school in 2004, resulting in hundreds of casualties.

  Religious extremist groups had long prohibited women from participating in their violent activities in the past. The waging of “jihad,” or holy war, was historically seen as the purview of men. As one terrorism scholar notes, “Given the strict gender demarcation of the public and private sphere in Islam, the resort to violence by women and girls, rather than constituting a restorative act, amounted to a sign of cultural fragmentation.”29 The success of female terrorists in other movements, however, eventually led fundamentalist religious extremist groups, such as Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), to change their practices. The spiritual head of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in 2004, stated in an interview with an Arab journalist in London in August 2001 that “Palestinian women do not need a religious ruling in order to perpetrate a suicide attack.” He claimed that, under certain circumstances, “Islam permits it.” A senior Hamas activist, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, also supported the use of women in suicide operations, stating, “There is no reason that the perpetration of suicide attacks should be monopolized by men.”30

  In some cases, though, religious women who are recruited to participate in a suicide mission have problems with shedding their religious appearance in order to not look suspicious when infiltrating the target area prior to carrying out the attack. One such case is that of a would-be female Palestinian suicide terrorist, twenty-six-year-old Thawiya Hamour, who provides us with insight into the thinking of some of these religious female terrorists. Her mission was to set off explosives in a densely populated area in West Jerusalem. She was f
itted with an explosive belt and underwent a briefing on how to detonate it.

  Hamour, however, was arrested before she could commit the attack, and she revealed in interviews that she had many problems psychologically in carrying out the mission. She stated that her commanders directed her to dress like a Western woman—wearing her hair down, putting on heavy makeup, and wearing tight pants. During media interviews, Hamour stated, “I wasn't afraid. I'm not afraid to die. I went for personal reasons. However, I did not want to arrive ‘upstairs’ (in Paradise) for impure reasons. I did not want to dress that way, because it is against my religion.”31 Another dispute between the would-be suicide terrorist and her handlers was their demand that she detonate the bomb even if she did not reach the target site, such as if there were a chance she had aroused suspicion and would get caught. “To blow myself up for nothing, what for?” she asked. “To die just so that my operators can brag about carrying out a terrorist attack?”32

  Female suicide terrorists were also prevalent during the 2003–2011 war in Iraq and US occupation of the country, where it was believed that some women were motivated by the loss of their husbands or other loved ones, just as in the case of the Chechen “black widows.” Specifically, al Qaeda in Iraq, a home-grown Sunni insurgent group that was believed to be led by foreigners, recruited many of these women.33

  The widespread use of female suicide bombers in different countries reflects the tactical advantages that women provide for terrorist organizations. First, women are less suspicious than men and are therefore less likely to attract the attention of security personnel. Second, in many of the conservative societies of the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere, there is a hesitation to body-search a woman. And third, a woman can wear a suicide device beneath her clothes, appear to be pregnant, and thus easily bypass security while approaching her target.34 However, with the rise in female suicide attacks around the world in recent years, security personnel are becoming more aware of this form of terrorism, thereby eliminating the element of surprise for the female terrorist.