Word: berko
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...their leadership to accept the new offer. Inside prison, Palestinian inmates are separated according to their allegiance to Hamas or Fatah, since otherwise they would clash, a mirror of their rivalry inside the Palestinian territories. Hamas prisoners are better organized and more disciplined than Fatah inmates, according to Anat Berko, a criminologist at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, who frequently speaks with the Palestinian inmates. She says that Hamas' efforts to free as many Palestinian prisoners as possible, and not just those belonging to Hamas, has earned the Islamic militants greater support among...
...meeting the same fate as Reem Riyashi. Though there were just six suicide attacks against Israelis in 2006, two were carried out by women. "There's a growing involvement of Palestinian women in terrorism, everything from scouting targets and smuggling guns and explosives to becoming suicide bombers," says Anat Berko, an Israeli counterterrorism expert at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, who spent 13 years inside Israeli high-security prisons interviewing convicted terrorists. And yet it remains difficult to pinpoint why certain women turn to martyrdom. Behind the motives of religion and rage at Israeli occupation, Palestinian...
After years of study by Berko and other counterinsurgency experts, a profile of Palestinian women suicide bombers is emerging. Male suicide bombers tend to be introverts, the women less so. The women are older and better schooled than their male counterparts. Whereas the men are usually in their late teens and early 20s with scant education, studies carried out by Shin Bet, the Israeli version of the FBI, on 67 women recruited to become suicide bombers from 2002 to 2005 found that 33% were college graduates and an additional 39% had finished high school...
...least some of the captured suicide bombers interviewed by Berko say their motivation is the promise of paradise. Terrorist recruiters often tell male martyrs that a bevy of 72 virgins awaits them in heaven. But some women suicide bombers believe that in paradise they will become queens, while others are told by recruiters that no matter how old or grotesque they may be in this life, they will become the fairest of the 72 virgins that await each jihad warrior...
...against suicide attacks relies ultimately on the conscience of the bombers. Israeli intelligence believes women receive far less training and preparation for their suicide missions than do men, ranging from weeks to days; on several occasions, would-be female terrorists refused at the last second to trigger the explosives. Berko says, "One woman prisoner told me how she was supposed to blow herself up in a crowd of Israelis but saw a woman pushing a baby in a carriage. That baby reminded her of her nephew, and she couldn't go through with it." Only by building on such brief...