Female converts and Islamic terrorism

Craig S. Smith:

Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out as a Catholic girl in this coal-mining corner of Belgium known as the "black country." She ended it in a grisly blast deep inside Iraq last month.

Degauque, 38, detonated her explosive vest amid an American military patrol in the town of Baquba on Nov. 9, injuring one American soldier, according to an account from the State Department given to Belgium's Federal Police.

Her unlikely journey into militant Islam stunned Europe and for many was an incomprehensible aberration; she was a lost soul led astray. But her story supports fears among many law enforcement officials and academics that female converts to the Continent's fastest-growing religion could bring a disturbing new wrinkle in the fight against terror: Western women committed to one of the world's deadliest causes.

European women marrying Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe, experts say. While the vast majority of those conversions are pro forma gestures to please moderately religious in-laws, a small but growing number are women who willingly adopt the comportment of their fundamentalist husbands.

Most are motivated by spiritual quests or are attracted to what they regard as an exotic culture. But for some, conversion is a political act, not unlike that by the women who joined the ranks of South American Marxist rebels in the 1960s and 1970s.

"They are people rebelling against a society in which they feel they don't belong," said Alain Grignard, a senior official in the antiterrorism division of the Belgian police. "They are people searching through a religion like Islam for a sense of solidarity."

He said there were many such women wed to the first wave of Europe's militant Islamists a decade ago, some of whom followed their husbands to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. While they supported their husbands' militancy, he said, they never acted themselves.

"This was the first," Grignard said, "and it's clear there could be others."

French antiterrorism officials have been warning for several years that female converts represent a small but increasingly important part of the terrorist threat in Europe. As early as May 2003, France's antiterrorist investigating judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, warned that European terrorist networks were trying to recruit Caucasian women to handle terrorist logistics because they would be less likely to raise suspicion. He said then that it was only a matter of time before the women moved on to more violent acts.

Degauque was born in this small suburb of Charleroi, a gritty coal and steel town where her father operated a crane, according to neighbors and friends. She grew up doted on by her mother, Liliane, who worked as a cleaner and monitor at the local elementary school.

"Her mother spoiled her," said Jeannine Beghin, who has known Degauque's mother since childhood. The women each had a son and were in the same hospital when their daughters were born within 10 days of each other. The families were neighbors in a quiet, neat neighborhood of two-story row houses on the far side of town from the coal heaps that give the region its nickname.

As a child, Degauque often spent Friday and Saturday nights at the Beghin home. Beghin recalled that Degauque's mother rented a hall and gave a catered party to celebrate her daughter's first Holy Communion.

Degauque's parents sent her to the best local high school, the Athene Royal in nearby Fontaine L'Eveque. Her teachers remember her as a well-dressed, well-behaved young woman, even if she was a middling student.

There were problems at home, but no more than with many teenagers, Beghin said. Still, Degauque seemed adrift by the time she took an apprenticeship as a sales clerk at a bakery in Charleroi after her third year of high school.

Talk that Degauque had fallen in with the wrong crowd soon circulated in the neighborhood. The police say she became known as a drug user, though she was never arrested. In her late teens, she followed her older brother in joining a local motorcycle club, the Apaches, and neighbors saw her come and go in a black leather jacket on the back of a boyfriend's motorcycle.

By most accounts, Degauque's wayward streak took a decisive turn when her brother was killed in a motorcycle accident when she was 20. He had always been the more popular, people who know the family say.

The death devastated the family, and Degauque moved out of the house, beginning a troubled life in Charleroi. She married a much older Turkish man in what neighbors presume was an arrangement to help him legalize his status in Belgium. They divorced two years later.

Degauque had several boyfriends after that and worked at the restaurant of one for a while. She eventually met an Algerian man who introduced her to Islam. She began appearing at her parents' home wearing a head scarf. Her mother told neighbors that she was pleased because the religion had helped her daughter stop drinking and doing drugs.

But her religious devotion took on a disturbing tone several years later after she met and married Issam Goris, the son of a Belgian father and Moroccan mother. Degauque moved with Goris to Brussels and then to Morocco, where she learned Arabic and studied the Koran. When she returned, she wore not only a head scarf but a full-length robe.

She and Goris moved to an apartment in the largely immigrant neighborhood near Brussels' Midi train station. Periodically, they would visit her parents.

Her appearance in full Islamic attire shocked the neighbors, but she seemed happy, even if her parents were not. Her mother complained to friends she was losing her daughter to her son-in-law's strict interpretation of Islam.

Degauque's parents did not know she had left the country until she called them from Syria in August, Beghin said.

The Belgian police now say Goris had fallen in with Islamists recruiting European Muslims to fight with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist network in Iraq.

The day she set off her bomb, the Americans found Goris, who was also wrapped in explosives, apparently about to carry out an attack. They shot him, killing him before he could detonate his charges.

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Converts to Terror