Word: womanities
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...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. The picture that emerges is of a once strong woman driven mad with sorrow after the death of her brother Thamer, who in the fall of 2003 joined an insurgent group linked to al-Qaeda. Hasna, who doted on her brother, had pushed him to become a leader in the group. Thamer volunteered for his own suicide mission in early...
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...
...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...
...morning Hasna blew herself up last July, there were 40 policemen and no women on duty at the checkpoint. At 9:30 a.m., a light-colored Opel drove to within 100 yards of the checkpoint, dropped off a female passenger and turned back toward Ramadi. The woman wore a billowing black gown known as an abaya, and her face was veiled. As she drew close to the blast walls of the checkpoint, she seemed to trip over her abaya and fall. According to eyewitnesses, the woman called out to the nearest policemen, "Come and help me up. I'm hurt...
...week after Hasna's death, Sadiya received two video CDS. She says she can scarcely recognize the woman in the recordings. "It is Hasna but without Thamer," she says. "When he died, she became half of herself, and you can see half a person on the video." It is common for suicide bombers to videotape a wasiya, or will; many are posted on jihadi websites. In the recordings, the bombers, usually masked, are shown praying from the Koran, extolling the virtues of martyrdom and damning their enemies (typically the U.S.) to hell...