Female Suicide Bombers. How common are they?

Kia Ora,

We now have the terrorist attacks in Moscow. The claims are that they were both women. How can they know so quick? Actually it is quite easy to identify the remains of someone who has worn a suicide vest amongst all the bodies parts & mayhem.  It takes you about 30 seconds to work out if a vehicle or vest bomber has hit.

Unless of course you are in NZ then a senior police officer would say they are still collating the information & the investigation would take months to confirm the source of the blast. That would be followed by the government (no matter what party) putting together a commission of inquiry & a select committee sub committee to find out what happened.

The results of which would announce that there was no clear evidence that a suicide bombing actually took place.

Now to the question of how common are Female suicide bombers? In Iraq the US military claimed that this type of attack was loosing support as they had started using women.

That flies in the face of intelligence that was available in 2004.

First was the report of a group in Iran asking for volunteer suicide bombers & getting 4000 volunteers in a week.

This was followed by about a week later of information of a website where you register to be a suicide bomber. There were 40,000 enquiries & 30,000 applications in the first week from memory. Over half the applications were from women or young teenage boys.

The Attraction was not Jihad for many either. It was the US$40,000 per successful detonation that went to the family.

It was reputed to be a very professional set up with both prospective bomber & family interviewed to ensure the applicant was suitable & family was happy with it all.

Of course once you have identified that it has being a suicide bombing (& it has to be done on the spot & extremely quickly) you must prepare for the follow up bombing as it is a common tactic.

In fact you hardly ever have a bombing in isolation as evidenced in Moscow & I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there were others that for one reason or another failed to detonate.

Even after the bombing it is going to take that required change in mindset to be able to shoot a female or elderly person that is perceived to be a suicide bomber.