24.10 Russia’s Female Suicide Bombers: Well-Organized and Hard to Stop
MOSCOW, October 24 (Nabi Abdullaev, RIA Novosti) - Investigators say that moments after Naida Asiyalova, a wan 30-year-old from Russia's violence-plagued republic of Dagestan, boarded a public bus one afternoon this week in the city of Volgograd, the bomb she was carrying exploded, claiming six lives.
The apparent attack serves as another reminder of the grim effectiveness of female suicide bombers, who have taken part in 20 attacks claiming at least 780 lives across Russia since June 2000, or an average of 60 lives a year.
Even without including the death tolls from two major attacks involving explosive-bearing female militants - the hostage crisis at Moscow's Dubrovka Theater in 2002 and the seizure of a school in the southern town of Beslan in 2004 - female suicide attacks in Russia have killed more than 24 people a year or nearly 18 people each. Recalculated to exclude a six-year lull in such attacks, the numbers rise to over 44 people per year, or more than 110 counting Dubrovka and Beslan.
The authorities' mixed history in combating this form of militancy, ranging from helplessness to temporary success, will inspire both anxiety and hope as Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi, a city a few hundred kilometers away from the heart of the unrelenting unrest in the North Caucasus.
While Russian and Western analyses of female suicide bombers 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 campaigns of terror.
A big question for Moscow as Sochi approaches will be how well its security services can identify and thwart these organizational networks.
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