Word: hasna
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TIME learned of Hasna from her sister Sadiya and their mother Shafiqa, who now live in hiding in Syria. (The names of the bomber and her family have been changed at the family's insistence.) Although aspects of their story are impossible to verify, important details tally with the version of events provided by Iraqi officials in Anbar and by the U.S. military. Sadiya and Shafiqa also allowed TIME to view but not record two video CDS given them by an al-Qaeda fighter. One is Hasna's last statement; the other is a recording of her suicide mission...
...they do it? Suicide bombers may end their lives in the same way, but it would be foolish to draw any conclusions about their motivations from a single story. Still, how Hasna came to blow herself up sheds some light on the cycle of hopelessness some Iraqi women, worn down by so many years of tyranny and war, find themselves...
...Hasna was distraught--not because her brother was dead but because he had not completed his mission. "She had been ready to hear about his death," says Sadiya. "But the idea that he would not be a martyr was too much for her to bear." Hasna locked herself indoors for a week, until the neighbors called Sadiya, certain her sister was dead. They broke down the door and found her comatose and surrounded by feces. Under Sadiya's care, she regained some of her health, but she continued to be haunted by the shame of Thamer's failure: she referred...
Soon after, Hasna approached her brother's former colleagues with a proposal. If they could get her a belt, she would bomb Kilometer 5 herself. The group was initially skeptical: it had never worked with a woman and felt certain she would lose her nerve at the last moment. But Hasna wore down the group with her insistence, and it sent her to Syria to be vetted by senior jihadi commanders and fitted for a bomb belt...
...next time Sadiya saw her sister, Hasna was almost giddy with anticipation. She told funny stories about her experiences in Syria. The jihadis' religious beliefs forbade them to touch her, so, she said, they had no idea how to measure her for the belt. She offered to give them her brassiere, but they had to first check with an imam whether Islam allowed a man to touch a woman's underclothes. (Sadiya says she never tried to talk Hasna out of her plan: "She was not the type of person whose mind you could change...