Inside the mind of a female suicide bomber

An increasing number of female jihadis are being recruited and trained to blow themselves up in the name of Islam. Alissa J Rubin visits an Iraqi jail to find out what makes young women turn themselves into killing machines Alissa J Rubin The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009

Ranya in Baquba jail, where she shared a cell with fellow would-be suicide bomber Baida Abdul Karim al-Shammari. Photograph: Michael Kamber In Baquba, the Iraqi police detective flipped pointlessly through a file on his desk; the daylight was too faint to read by and the electricity had long since gone off. He seemed about to say something. Then a bomb exploded a few blocks away, and his office shook. The radios on his desk crackled. He nodded to his colleagues, and they ran into the hall to join police officers already rushing to the site of the explosion. As he rose to follow them, the detective - Major Hosham al-Tamimi, then director of the National Investigation and Information Bureau - indicated the file before him. "You will like Baida," he said. It was a curious thing to say about someone who sought to kill people like him and like me. He added, almost pensively: "I like Baida. She is honest."

Baida is one of 16 female would-be suicide-bomber suspects or accomplices who have been captured by the police in Diyala province since the beginning of 2008; almost as many have blown themselves up. When I first met Baida in February, she had already been in jail more than two months. She was in the same cell as another would-be suicide bomber, Ranya, who was 15 when she was caught on her way to a bombing, her vest already strapped on. Ranya's mother was also in the jail because she was believed to be connected to those involved in trying to organize Ranya's death.

Nowhere, it seems, have more women blown themselves up in so short a time as in Iraq, where there have been some 60 suicide bombings attempted or carried out by women, the majority of them in 2007 and 2008 - the numbers, for men as well as women, are lower this year, though the attacks continue. It is difficult to learn much about suicide bombers since there is rarely anything left of them.

Each woman's story is unique, but their journeys to jihad do have things in common. Many have lost close male relatives. Baida and Ranya lost fathers and brothers. Many of the women live in isolated communities dominated by extremists, where radical understandings of Islam are the norm. In such places, women are often powerless to control much about their lives; they cannot choose whom they marry, how many children to have or whether they can go to school beyond the primary years. Becoming a suicide bomber is a choice of sorts that gives some women a sense of being special, with a distinguished destiny. But Hosham urged me not to generalise: "All the cases are different. Some are old; some are young; some are just criminals; some are believers. They have different reasons."

The rise in the number of female suicide bombers in Iraq coincided with the expanding ability of the security forces to defeat bombers who were men. When, in 2006 and 2007, American and Iraqi forces began to use concrete barriers to protect government buildings, markets and other gathering places from car bombs, the insurgents turned to women, who could use to advantage their traditional dress: a voluminous, floor-length black abaya. Arab notions of modesty make it unthinkable that the police or guards would search women. Gradually the police learned to look for telltale signs, Hosham told me. Women often wear double abayas to hide their suicide vests. And they apply heavy make-up because they believe they are going to heaven and want to look their best. Last September, the Iraqi government completed training for 27 policewomen in Diyala. The effort came too late to save at least 130 people and probably more who have died in the province in suicide bombings carried out by women. Hosham was right. I liked Baida immediately. She had an open face and pale skin, a medium build and an unassuming manner. Her black veil was simple. A few strands of light brown hair strayed out, suggesting that, while conservative, she was not rigid. She seemed educated and told her story in a straightforward way.

She began in a soft voice: "My name is Baida Abdul Karim al-Shammari, and I am from New Baquba near the general hospital. I am one of eight children; five were killed. The police raided our home. It was a half- hour before dawn during Ramadan. The Americans were with them." She added with a touch of pride: "My brothers were mujahideen. They made IEDs." Mujahideen means holy fighters, and in the context of Iraq, they are fighters against the infidels, the Americans. IEDs are improvised explosive devices. She told me she helped make such devices, going to the market to buy wire and other bomb parts and working at putting bombs together. Men are routinely paid for such work; women are paid, too, but less. Baida was proud to be a volunteer. "I knew we were fighting against the Americans, and they are the occupation," she told me. "We are doing it for God's sake. We are doing it as jihad." When Baida was 17 her mother died, and a few months later, at her father's behest, Baida married. Almost immediately she knew she had made a mistake. A week after her wedding, according to Baida, her husband threw a cup of cream at her head; soon beatings became regular. She smiled sweetly and shrugged: "His hand got used to beating me."

For Baida, as for many Iraqi suicide bombers, violent insurgency was the family business. It was shortly after the American invasion that her brothers began to manufacture IEDs. One was killed when his handiwork exploded as he was concealing it. She had cousins who were also insurgents. While they were paid for their work, she said, she was herself motivated mainly by revenge. Later it would be revenge for the deaths of her father and four brothers in what she said was a joint American-Iraqi raid on their home, but at first it was more general. She told me she watched the Americans shoot a neighbour in 2005, and she replayed the image over and over in her mind: "I saw him running toward them, and then they shot him in the neck. I still see him. I still remember how he fell when the Americans shot him, and I saw him clawing on the ground in the dust before his soul left his body. After that I began to help with making the improvised explosive devices."

Executing a successful suicide bombing is rarely a lone act. It requires preparing a suicide vest, teaching the would-be bomber how to use it, and planning the mission. It means in some cases setting up a camera nearby so that the event can be filmed. For women, who rarely drive in Iraq, it would be impossible to get to the bomb site without assistance. Most of the women who blew themselves up were supported and trained by a network of extremists - often family members already active in the insurgency.

After her brothers and father were killed, Baida began to work with some of her cousins; they were also fighters and even more radical Islamists than her brothers. One of them died in a suicide attack, but not before introducing her to a group, run from Syria, that was connected to the Islamic State of Iraq - an umbrella organisation of insurgency groups. A goal of the group was to prepare men and women for suicide missions. "Maybe I can introduce you to them," she said warmly. "You could go meet them since they are free."

Baida initially did not plan to become a suicide bomber. Her cell members announced their readiness for a suicide mission in front of the group, making a public commitment, signalling that they had embraced the idea of a certain kind of death that would bring membership in a holy community. The group dynamic seemed designed to make participants feel as if they were freely choosing their destiny. That sense of freedom was an important component of their metamorphosis into suicide bombers. It was certainly important to Baida, who felt she controlled little in her life, to feel in control of her death. When I brought up the reality that the vast majority of suicide bombings in Iraq kill ordinary Iraqis, she would only say that she thought killing Iraqis was haram, or forbidden.

"We had meetings of 11 people; some came to the meeting with their faces covered,"Baida told me. "There were three women in the group. You could choose whether you wanted to do it. They wanted me to wear the explosive belt against the police, but I refused. I said: 'I will not do it against Iraqis.' I said: 'If I do it against the police I will go to hell because the police are Muslims. But if I do it against the Americans then I will go to heaven."

A few weeks later, when I met Baida again, she tried to explain to me the line dividing when it is halal (permitted) to kill a person and when it is forbidden. She said she followed the rules of her group, but her cousins had different rules: they would kill anybody. Was there a difference, I wondered, between killing American soldiers and killing American civilians, like reconstruction workers? No, she said: "I am willing to explode them, even civilians, because they are invaders and blasphemers and Jewish. I will explode them first because they are Jewish and because they feel free to take our lands." My interpreter asked where she stood: was it halal to kill her? "We consider you a spy, working with them," Baida said. Her choice of suicide was not entirely hers to make. The suicide vests given to participants were fitted with remote detonators so that someone else could explode the would-be bomber if she somehow failed to do it herself. This was a relatively new aspect of suicide bombing in Iraq. A second person, with a second detonator, would go on the mission to ensure against changes of heart. "One day this woman, Shaima, said: 'I am ready.' I saw Shaima when they put the vest on her. It was very heavy. With Shaima, they exploded her; she did not explode herself. There were five or six killed."

By the time I met Baida she was eager to get on with her mission, waiting for the day when she would be released from jail and be able to pick up her vest, which she said was being kept for her. (She has yet to be charged with any crime.) She appeared to have let go of most earthly ties. A mother of two boys and a girl, all under eight, she had not seen them since her arrest last year. When I asked if they missed her, she said, almost airily: "Allah will take care of them."

"As soon as I get out I will explode myself against the invaders," she told me. Before we left, I asked when it would be convenient to come and see her again. She said she was being moved soon to a psychiatric hospital in Baghdad, and she was afraid. I asked how we could get in touch. It turned out that she had smuggled a mobile phone into the jail, and kept the sim card hidden in her underwear. Once the phone itself was discovered - she had hidden it in a ceiling-light fixture - and confiscated, but she had somehow got access to another phone. "They don't know," she said softly, nodding at the policemen in the room, who were staring at a music video. I felt a wave of unease. She was not a beginner.

Ranya, like Baida, was from an insurgent family. There was her aunt Wijdan, who police say was a recruiter of women; her father, who the police believed was involved in making bombs for the insurgency; and a brother who was abducted and may also have been involved. A year after Ranya's father was kidnapped and killed by a Shiite militia, her mother acquiesced to Ranya's marriage in 2007 to a minor figure in the Islamic State of Iraq.

Less than a year after she was married, Ranya's husband brought her to a house in Baquba where two women he described as cousins outfitted her with a suicide vest: "They gave me something to eat and something to drink; it had a nice smell," she recalled. "Then they put the explosive belt on me, those two girls did. I remember there were red wires, but I didn't know what was inside it. They put it over my head." Baida later told me that, from her own conversations in jail with Ranya, it was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing and was proud of it.

After Ranya was outfitted with the vest, a woman in the house, Um Fatima, took her shopping. They went to one of Baquba's bazaars, and as Um Fatima looked at pots and pans Ranya drifted off. "There was a moment, only a moment, when Ranya felt afraid of death," Hosham said. Ranya told me she just wanted to see her mother. You can imagine that moment: realising that your life might be about to end and you aren't ready. When Um Fatima saw that she had lost Ranya, she fled the market, throwing away the remote detonator she was planning to use if Ranya failed to explode herself. The police later found the detonator.

Meanwhile Ranya, wearing her suicide vest, unsure where she was going, wandered Baquba's back alleys. As she approached a checkpoint manned by members of the Awakening, the American-backed neighbourhood watch formed to fight al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, they ordered her to stop, according to Lieutenant Kadhim Ahmed al-Tamimi, a detective involved in the case. "When they were in doubt about whether she was a suicide bomber they asked a woman on the street to search her, the woman opened the abaya, and when she saw all the wires, she cried out and ran away," Kadhim said. A few hours later Ranya was in jail along with her mother. Ranya was convicted on 3 August under Iraq's terrorism law and sentenced to seven and a half years in
prison.

One day in March, an interpreter told me that Baida had called several times from the psychiatric hospital and wanted to see us again. We called and told her we would come the next morning. The Rashad psychiatric hospital lies at the very end of the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City. Spread over extensive grounds, it had been neglected for years: the grass was shoulder high and the wards almost bare of furnishings (much of it had been looted after the US invasion). Some patients wandered about, talking to themselves. Some looked as if they had not washed in months.

We met Baida in the office of the head nurse for the criminally insane. She looked tired and much less ebullient than when I saw her in jail. I had brought her a bag of fresh oranges. She accepted them with a weak smile and only asked: "When will you come back? Tomorrow?" I worried she needed the company of more normal people. When we returned to the office, one of our other interpreters took me aside.

A military interpreter before he switched to journalism, he was streetwise; a Shiite who lived in a Sunni neighbourhood; a survivor. He told me Baida had called many times in the last three weeks wanting to know when I would visit the hospital - a bad sign, he said. There are no sureties when dealing with insurgents, but one rule is not to tell them exactly when you will be in a particular place. If they know, they can plan an ambush or a kidnapping or detonate an IED under your car. "Don't go to see her again," the interpreter said.

For the next meeting with Baida, our security adviser set a time limit, estimating that as soon as we arrived at the hospital, she might hear we were there and make a phone call to her jihadist friends. Baida called us twice to see "exactly when you are coming". We lied, keeping it vague. When we did finally go, we met with Baida alone. I asked her gently, and as non-judgmentally as I could, whether she wanted to kill me because I was a foreigner. "Frankly, yes." Then she added, to soften it: "Not specifically you, because I know you."

Would she tell her extremist cousins or her friends about me? "I won't sacrifice my friendship," she said. A moment later she reversed herself. "But if they insisted, I would. If they kill Americans they will do a big huge banquet." She smiled beatifically. "Frankly, my cousins called me when they knew I would meet a journalist and translator and they did their best to get your descriptions and the date you would come. They asked me about the date many times. They know the way to the hospital. They would be waiting for you and would kill you. They said to me: 'If you will do that for us, we will help you escape from the hospital, even from prison.' They asked for other details: what were your names; what did you look like?"

She seemed excited now at the thought of our capture. "They do not want to kill you, but to torture you and make lunch of your flesh. I could not do anything to help you." I looked at my watch, worried we had stayed too long. I got up hurriedly, adjusted my veil, and thanked her for her time. Baida was smiling again. "If I had not seen you before and talked to you, I would kill you with my own hands," she said. "Do not be deceived by my peaceful face. I have a heart of stone."

A few days later Baida was transferred back to the jail in Baquba after doctors determined that she had no psychological disorder. "You have a brain like a computer. You shouldn't be here," they told her. At this time of writing she is still in jail. For now, she tells whoever asks that she's prepared to go out and kill the enemy; but if she were to start saying that she no longer would do that, I imagine she would be released quite quickly. And I have no reason to doubt that she would then carry out her dream of blowing herself up.

Alissa J Rubin is the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times
guardian.co.uk C Guardian News and Media Limited 2009