Internationsl Herald Tribune (hat tip Brussels Journal): BRUSSELS: On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes.
In her living room, El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair. The only adornment is a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY.
But it is on the Internet that El Aroud has distinguished herself. Writing in French under the name Oum Obeyda, she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe.
She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she browbeats Muslim men to go and fight, and rallies women to join the cause.
"It's not my role to set off bombs - that's ridiculous," she said in a rare interview. "I have a weapon. It's to write. It's to speak out. That's my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb."
El Aroud has not only made a name for herself among devotees of radical forums where she broadcasts her message of hatred toward the West. She also is well known to intelligence officials throughout Europe as simply "Malika" - an Islamist who is at the forefront of the movement by women to take a larger role in the male-dominated global jihad.
The authorities have noted an increase in suicide bombings carried out by women - the American military reports that 18 women have conducted suicide missions in Iraq so far this year, compared with 8 all of last year - but they say there is also a less violent yet potentially more insidious army of women organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either join their husbands in the fight or step into the breach as men are jailed or killed.
"Women are coming of age in jihad and are entering a world once reserved for men," said Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. "Malika is a role model, an icon who is bold enough to use her own name. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She's very clever - and extremely dangerous."
El Aroud began her rise to prominence because of a man in her life. Two days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, her husband carried out a bombing in Afghanistan that killed the anti-Taliban warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud at the behest of Osama bin Laden. Her husband was killed, and she took to the Internet as the widow of a martyr.
She remarried, and she and her new husband were convicted in Switzerland for operating pro-Qaeda Web sites. Now, according to the Belgian authorities, she is a suspect in what the authorities say they believe is a plot to carry out an attack in Belgium...
After all, she said, she knows the rules. "I write in a legal way," she said. "I know what I'm doing. I'm Belgian. I know the system."
That system has often been lenient for her. She was detained last December with 13 others in a suspected plot to free a convicted terrorist from prison and to mount an attack in Brussels. But Belgian law required that they be released within 24 hours because no charges were brought and searches failed to turn up weapons, explosives or incriminating documents.
Now, even as El Aroud remains under constant surveillance, she is back home rallying militants on her Web site - and collecting more than $1,100 a month in government unemployment benefits...
