BAQUBA, Diyala province - Before sending her off with a suicide bomb strapped
to her waist, Rania al-Anbaki's husband made a wish.
"You'll be a martyr and we'll meet in heaven. I hope you'll choose me," she
recalls him saying.
Interviewed in an Iraqi police station two years later, Anbaki said she did
indeed meet her husband again - but in prison rather than paradise.
"He was arrested in a raid on an al-Qaeda cell," she said. "He'd been carrying
a fake identity card."
At the time of their brief reunion, Anbaki had already been in
custody for two months. She was stopped by security forces in Baquba, the
capital of Iraq's Diyala province, before the device attached to her body could
be detonated.
In her late twenties, she is serving a seven-year prison term. Police officials
were present throughout her recent interview with the Institute for War and
Peace Reporting, occasionally interrupting her.
Anbaki has the hardened manner and dark complexion of a woman who grew up tough
in the Iraqi countryside. She showed no emotion as she described her past. She
said she was heavily drugged before being fitted with a bomb and was unaware of
her actions. When her husband spoke of seeing her in heaven, she did not
understand what he meant but felt only that "something strange was about to
happen".
However, the security forces in Baquba question whether she was really coerced
into becoming a bomber. After being arrested in the city center in August 2008,
she argued with the policemen, haranguing them as "traitors".
The Sunni Arab insurgency has maintained a stubborn grip on Diyala, despite a
sharp reduction in violence over the past few years. The province lies
northeast of Baghdad, along the porous border with Iran.
The violence has deepened fissures in the province's mixed population, which is
divided by sect between Sunnis and Shi'ites, and by ethnicity between Kurds and
Arabs.
Of the 60 major suicide attacks recorded in Diyala since 2003, 23 were carried
out by women.
As in other parts of Iraq, women are thought to have been favored by the
insurgency because they initially attracted less attention than their male
counterparts. Social norms prohibited men from frisking women at checkpoints,
while the recruitment of female officers was at times unable to keep pace with
the supply of bombers.
Security officials say groups such as al-Qaeda manage sophisticated networks of
female suicide bombers in Diyala, often with the help of older women. The
best-known of these handlers was Samira Jassim, nicknamed the "Mother of
Believers", who was arrested in early 2009. According to the Iraqi military,
she had persuaded 80 women to become bombers, of whom 28 went on to launch
attacks, many of them beyond the province.
In a filmed confession, Jassim said her recruits had been the victims of rape
or violence, and became convinced that becoming a suicide bomber was a means of
vengeance or redemption.
Anbaki is one of five women currently in custody in Diyala who did not complete
their mission. In common with other female bombers, she has lost male relatives
to the conflict - her father and brother were kidnapped and killed by
militiamen in 2006. After their deaths, she was forced to marry her cousin, a
blacksmith. Though she said she was unaware of his links to the insurgency, she
knew him to be fiercely religious.
"I used to like singing, and I dreamt of becoming a teacher," she said. "After
marriage, my husband forbade me from listening to songs. He used to read the
Koran a lot and spent many days away from home on some or other pretext. I
became lonely."
When Anbaki asked him to buy a television, he refused, saying it encouraged
infidelity and devil worship. When he found her listening to an Arabic song on
the radio, he flew into a rage. "He smashed the radio and gave me a thrashing,
all the while explaining how my actions would send me to hell," she said.
The couple lived in the village of al-Mikhesa, outside Baquba. They had no
children and Anbaki said she was not allowed to make friends. One day in the
third year of their marriage, her husband took her to the nearby district of
al-Ghatoon.
"It was just like a dream," said Anbaki. She said she was introduced to a
relative of her husband, a woman in her forties who gave her name as Um Fatima.
They exchanged small talk and Anbaki was served a glass of peach juice, which
she recalled made her feel "weak and dizzy".
Barely conscious, she said she was fitted out by her husband and Um Fatima in a
vest packed with explosives. "My husband kept talking to me about jihad. Um
Fatima left us in the room and he kissed me on the forehead."
Drugged and dressed in a suicide vest, Anbaki said she was escorted into Baquba
by Um Fatima. The women went to a marketplace, where they ended up being
separated by the crowd.
Anbaki said she was stopped by a member of the Sahwa, a Sunni Arab militia that
has joined the government in the fight against al-Qaeda. When she gave her name
and said she was going home, the militiaman became suspicious as he did not
recognize her family from the neighborhood.
The Sahwa member raised the alarm and the security forces cordoned off the
area. Anbaki said she was ordered to remove her cloak. She did so, revealing
the vest packed with explosives. She was immobilized and the device she was
wearing was disabled by an expert.
Anbaki insists she did not know how to detonate the bomb and assumed it was
controlled remotely by Um Fatima, whom she had lost in the crowd. "I was pretty
sure I had no remote control device. My husband didn't teach me how to use
one," she said.
Nor is Anbaki clear what her intended target was. "Maybe the operation was
against the crowd in Diyala market, but it failed because Um Fatima lost sight
of me ... Maybe the target was a checkpoint, or an official or a leader," she
said.
However, the security forces in Diyala believe Anbaki's device was attached to
a trigger and she was either unable or unwilling to detonate it. The would-be
bomber said she did not act of her own accord and would not want other women to
follow her path.
"I didn't know what was going on," she said, explaining that she now feels
"shame and regret". "I implore any woman to think a thousand times before
committing such an act. It runs counter to our faith, which calls for love and
tolerance."
Um Fatima and Anbaki's husband were arrested on terrorism charges and remain in
custody. Anbaki's mother was also detained, but has since been released.
Attacks by women bombers have decreased over the past few years, partly as a
result of the recruitment of women officers to carry out searches at
checkpoints.
Wijdan Adil, the head of a battalion of women recruits to Diyala's security
forces, said many of her officers worked in plainclothes. "Our girls work as
secret agents, undercover in parks, markets and crowded places. They also take
part in raids carried out by the security forces," she said.
Colonel Jalil al-Jiburi of the Diyala police force said women who became
suicide bombers were driven by "revenge, poverty and a lack of cultural and
religious awareness". He said many of the women had been led to believe
unquestioningly that they would go to heaven as a result of their actions.
Ali Mohammed is an IWPR-trained reporter in Baquba.
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