Hasna, female suicide bomber

From TIME.


No one remembers Hasna Maryi ever opening her family's Koran. She rarely attended her village mosque and told others she regarded the Imam there as a lech. So it was not religious extremism that made this villager from Anbar province blow herself up at an Iraqi police checkpoint last summer.

...[Her brother] Thamer volunteered for his own suicide mission in early 2007 ...On a February morning Thamer was being driven to the Kilometer 5 security checkpoint by some fellow jihadis when one of their belts exploded prematurely, killing everyone in the car.

...Hasna was distraught — not because her brother was dead, but because he had not completed his mission. ...It wasn't long before she concluded that the only way to redeem her brother was to complete his mission. ...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.


On the morning she blew herself up last July, there were 40 policemen on duty at the checkpoint. ...As [Hasna] 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." When two policemen approached, the woman reached into her tunic and pulled the trigger on her bomb belt, instantly killing the two cops and fatally injuring a third. A huge fireball slammed into a car parked at the checkpoint, and the five civilians inside were badly burned.

...video shot by one of the men who drove her to the checkpoint, shows Hasna looking impassively out of the window until they approach Kilometer 5. Then she pulls a veil over her face and adjusts the belt around her waist before stepping out. One of the men in the car whispers, "God is great!" She doesn't respond or look back. As the car drives away, the video, shot through the rear window, shows her approaching the checkpoint. She is quickly obscured from view by the dust trail behind the car. Nearly a minute later there's a flash, a muffled boom and a column of black smoke. "God is great!" says the cameraman. "The stupid woman did it."

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Killing and dying for a holy war you don't believe in - stupid indeed.