'Mother of all suicide bombers' warns of rise in attacks

A captured Iraqi terrorist known as the "mother of the female suicide bombers" has taunted interrogators that her network of volunteers is too big to be destroyed by her arrest. Itisam Adwan, who is accused of grooming young and vulnerable women for bomb attacks, has told police in Baquba that so many others are following her lead that they will not be able to stop them. Last week a suicide bomber who blew herself killing five Iraqi guards at a checkpoint was revealed by police to have been just 13 years old - making her the youngest such attacker so far in a spate of such bombings in the city, capital of the troubled Diyala province. Baquba, 50 miles northeast of Baghdad, has suffered an onslaught of women, some barely out of their teens, willing to inflict mass casualties as they target the security forces and public venues like markets. Although female suicide bombers had been seen in other wars, such as Chechnya's Black Widows or the Tamil Tigers' Death Maidens, the phenomenon was rare in Iraq until early this year. The attack on Monday brought to 27 the number of women who had dressed up in explosives to kill themselves and others in Diyala alone. Across Iraq since the beginning of the year in Iraq more than 30 women have died in suicide attacks, compared with only eight in 2007. Six days after the attack, police said they had still not determined the identity of the girl involved. But they revealed startling details about Itisam Adwan, whom they arrested in late September, and the role of women in fomenting such attacks. The terrorist, who goes by the nom de guerre, Umm Fatima - the mother of Fatima - is said to be both tough and unrepentant. Captain Ahmed Jasim, a spokesman for the Baquba police, said that the 38-year-old had described how a group of women, mainly widows of terrorist "martyrs", who are grooming younger relatives and acquaintances for death. "She said she is just one of many mothers who do the same job," he said. "And there are many girls who are willing to die. The mothers tell them that they will go to heaven, where they will sit by rivers of honey and have lunch with the prophet Mohammad and live in comfort. "The girls are the wives of al-Qaeda members, so their husbands tell them that their martyrdom would be glorious and the husbands too will automatically get to heaven as a result of their wives willingness to kill themselves in the name of religion." Rania Ibrahim, a 15-year old who was captured at a checkpoint wearing a suicide vest in Diyala in August, is one of those pushed into terrorism in this way. She was a frustrated, poorly-educated teenager who had been sold into marriage with a terrorist operative. Umm Fatima, her husband's aunt, then cajoled her into attacking a police station. "I left school at 11 and my mother spent the rest of the time trying to find a buyer to marry me," she said. "I wanted to be a doctor but my husband said he wanted me to go to paradise, where he would soon join me." But Rania, who claimed she was fed pills and alcohol before her attack, attracted the suspicions of police at the check-point. She was called forward and the police cut the belt from her body. Umm Fatima, who is believed to have held the remote electronic trigger for the device, was unable to explode the bomb. Rania is now in prison in Baquba but her mother, Bassad Selman Mohana, lives in a dilapidated house near the centre of the once neat and prosperous central Iraqi city. She said she felt betrayed and deceived by her son-in-law, Mohammad Hassan, who was himself arrested a month after his young wife was taken into custody. "My daughter is a good girl and I thought he was a good man," she said. "Around here, everyone makes price the first factor in determining who the girls marry. He deceived me, I did not know he was involved with al-Qaeda." The Jamestown Institute, a terrorism research foundation, reported that al-Qaeda has recognised the success of the tactic of using women to stage suicide attacks in Iraq. For the first time the group has now nominated a woman as an emir or prince of its operation. Websites have dubbed the women, Umm Salameh, as the emir of the al-Nitaqayn - the battalion of the two belts. The name alludes to a famous Koranic figure who was the daughter of the prophet Mohammad's closest lieutenant and first successor, Abu Bakr. Umm Salameh is the widow of an al-Qaeda leader in northern Iraq who was killed last year in an airstrike. "When Muslim land is occupied by non-believers, jihad is mandatory for all Muslims, male and female," said Dr Hani al-Sibai, a London-based Islamist Sunni scholar. "Women are allowed to conduct jihad without the approval of parents or spouse." The enshrouding black gowns, known as abayas, that many Iraqi women are forced to wear in deference to Islamic guidelines on modesty, afford the perfect camouflage for a would-be bomber. Islamic tradition prevents men from searching Iraqi women. Farhana Ali, an analyst with Rand Corp, told an American radio station: "It's creating an enormous security problem for US and Iraqi forces." Baquba has been a stronghold for al-Qaeda since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the American-led coalition. The city has been named by al-Qaeda propagandists as the putative capital of an Islamic state of Iraq. A senior interior ministry official has acknowledged that conflict on its streets has impelled some woman to strike out at the authorities. Brigadier General Abdul Karim Khalaf said: "The psychological pressures of the security situation that we used to have in Diyala - the systematic killing, especially in some parts of Baquba where the government's forces' presence was weak - allowed the insurgents to use religion to exploit women. Women bombers are a problem for us. Men can't search women... so they take advantage of this weakness in Iraqi society." Some see the recruitment of women suicide bombers an act of desperation by al-Qaeda, which has been pushed out of its former strongholds in Baghdad and western Iraq by a surge of US forces. Diaa Rashwan, who follows Islamic militancy for Egypt's Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies said women should be in the "last rows" of fighting. "So to see women (suicide bombers) shows an abnormal situation: the absence of men." To cope with the higher threat the Baquba police has recruited a 200-strong women only force to search females passing though checkpoints. But the cult of the suicide bomber is now part of the city's daily life. One student said that whenever he passes a heavy-set girl, he is often tempted to ask if she is concealing plastic explosives.