In February 2012 a woman had attempted to blow up FCDA secretariat, though the incident made the local news it all sounded to surreal for it to take foothold in the minds of the residents of Abuja. If it had succeeded it will have shattered the myth of the involvement of the female gender in the violent campaign being waged by Boko Haram since 2009.
However, the attacks in the last one week have changed the notion about female suicide bombers in Nigeria. In Kano, there has been a string of attacks perpetrated by teenage girls, blowing themselves up to smithereens. This changes a lot of things, first it shows the level of desperation to wreak as much havoc as much as possible and also to carry out the attacks with minimal detection. For in our socio-cultural milieu, the perception of women committing wrong ranks at the bottom, it is the latter that has led several security analysts including me when I was asked by a Dutch TV network earlier in the year on whether there were female combatants in BH’s war against the Nigerian State, the answer at then was No.
However, with this changing dynamics and new low recorded by the insurgents shows a marked departure from the norm. However, Boko Haram’s use of female suicide bombers has a global jihadi antecedent. She was the Palestinian Reem Riyashi.
Riyashi detonated a 2 kg bomb inside a building where the thousands of Palestinians who cross each day from Gaza to work in a neighbouring industrial zone are processed.
The Israeli army reported that when she reached the metal detector at the terminal, Riyashi pretended to be crippled and claimed to have metal plates in her leg which would sound the alarm. She asked to have a body search instead. After being taken to an area where a group of soldiers and policemen were checking bags, she was told to wait for a woman to come and search her in a cubicle. It was then that she detonated the explosive device.
Two Israeli soldiers, a policeman and a civilian security worker were killed. Seven other Israelis and four Palestinians were injured.
According to the Wikipedia entry under her name Riyashi was born in 1982 and she died on 14 January 200 in a suicide attack. Hamas and the Al Aqsa Brigade claimed that the attack by Riyashi was a joint operation mounted as a response to weeks of Israeli incursions into West Bank cities that had left about 25 Palestinians dead. Unlike most bombers, Riyashi came from a wealthy family. She was the eighth Palestinian female suicide bomber, but only the second to have left behind children. Riyashi was the first female suicide bomber sent by Hamas whose spiritual leader at the time, Sheikh Yassin had initially objected to the involvement of women in such actions, altering this position shortly before his assassination by Israel in March 2004. Wearing combat fatigues and holding an automatic rifle with a rocket-propelled grenade in the foreground, Riyashi said that since age 13 she had dreamed of turning “my body into deadly shrapnel against the Zionists“.
She continued: “I always wanted to be the first woman to carry out a martyrdom operation, where parts of my body can fly all over … God has given me two children. I love them [with] a kind of love that only God knows, but my love to meet God is stronger still.” Nigeria must not get to this, for if we ever do, no one will be safe from warped ideological stand of death by suicide blasts
In conclusion, as narrated by Abu Huraira, Prophet Muhammad PBUH observed that. He who killed himself with steel (weapon) would be the eternal denizen of the fire of hell and he would have that weapon in his hand and would be thrusting that in his stomach forever and ever, he who drank poison and killed himself would sip that in the fire of hell, where he is doomed forever and ever, and he whoever killed himself by falling from the top of a mountain would constantly fall in the fire of hell and would live there forever and ever.
This is the part jihadist forget.
Alkasim Abdulkadir is currently an Editor at Citizensplatform.net, an Online News portal. He e has worked as a Producer for BBC Media Action and as a news contributor for CNN, Aljazeera, France 24 and Guardian UK. He is Contributing Editor at The Trent.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
