Chechnya's Deadly "Black Widows": Young Chechen Women Are Striking Fear in the Hearts of Russians by Staging Suicide Missions. but Are They Willing Martyrs-Or Pawns in a Male War? Only One Has Ever Survived to Tell Her Story

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Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, 22, had trouble setting off the 1.5kg of plastic explosives in her black shoulder bag. Sitting in a cafe on a hot day in Moscow on 9 July last year, she took a deep breath and reached for the detonator--calm at first, then frantic. "I pushed the button about 20 times to set off the bomb, but it just wasn't working," she later said in police interviews. The bomb did go off eventually--a Federal Security Service bomb disposal expert, 29-year-old Major Georgy Trofimov, was killed while attempting to defuse it.

Zarema is not a typical Chechen suicide bomber only in that she is still alive. Captured by the Russian police after her mission failed--uniquely for a Chechen woman--she has since been held in prison in Moscow. Because of her bungled attempt, more is known about Zarema than about any of her predecessors: she has had the chance to tell her story in the Russian media, never in direct interviews but in second-hand reports via the police.

The aeroplanes from Moscow that crashed on Tuesday 24 August had the names of two Chechen women on their passenger lists, one in each plane. Russia is becoming obsessed with these women, and with good reason: almost every suicide bombing connected to Chechnya in the past two years has involved women. Indeed, some of the attacks have been exclusively carried out by women. Last December, two women blew themselves up metres away from the Kremlin, killing five and injuring 12, only days after two other women were seen jumping from a train blast in south Russia that killed 44. In the Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow in October 2002, during a performance of the …