Fifteen-year-old Raniya Ibrahim dreamed of being a doctor, but instead she walked into a crowded market in Baqubah with 20kg of explosives strapped to her waist.
But the plan, allegedly masterminded by her husband and other al-Qaeda in Iraq operatives — possibly including her mother — went wrong when police arrested Raniya in the capital of Diyala Province, long an insurgent stronghold.
Raniya claims she is innocent, tricked by her husband and two women into wearing an explosives vest that she never intended to use before being taken to the market where they planned to detonate the dynamite by remote control.
If Raniya, a Sunni Arab, or her jihadist minders had succeeded, she would have not only blown herself into shards of bone and flesh, but killed everyone around her for 50m.
For jihadists, her martyrdom would have amounted to a ticket to paradise.
“Martyrdom is the right thing, my husband said to me,” cherubic-faced Raniya said in a rare glimpse into the mind of a potential suicide bomber and al-Qaeda’s methods in the recruitment of young women to their cause.
“He told me that in paradise there are female angels with intensely white skin and deep black eyes. Paradise is like a large garden full of flowers, with two rivers — one sweet and another made of honey,” she said.
Covered from head to toe in a jet-black abaya, the traditional Arabic dress for women, Raniya smiled with childish delight as she recalled the words of her husband, al-Qaeda operative who investigators say is wanted for 40 murders, most of them beheadings.
Raniya, who said she dreamed of being a doctor but married at 14 at the insistence of her apparently financially strapped mother, spoke softly about her ordeal that she said included drugging and detention, before the media spotlight.
“I was trying to go to my mother and leave the vest with her or ask her to inform the police,” she said.
Suicide bombers are rarely caught alive and Raniya has become the first and youngest woman in Iraq apprehended with an explosive belt on her body, police said.
Her arrest is media gold for Iraqi security forces, who have been parading her in front of the press in hopes they will win minds in a propaganda war against an insurgency that flares up weekly in this part of the country.
Police say that al-Qaeda in Iraq is in trouble as an Iraqi-led but US-backed counter-insurgency has hit at the heart of the group, forcing them to turn to young women as male candidates have dried up.
Iraqi security officials said that more than 30 women have blown themselves up this year compared to a only a handful last year.
“Al-Qaeda [in Iraq] has lost its ability to recruit men and now it has started with women, the young, the retarded and beggars,” Diyala police chief Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf said. “They have lost their power.”
As she recounted the events leading to her arrest on Aug. 24, Raniya, who quit school when she was 11, insisted in simple but clear Arabic that she was caught up in a web of lies and deceit.
“My husband took me to the house of his cousin, a woman who I saw for the first time and she asked me to put on the explosive vest. She said that it will not blow up, just wear it,” she said.
“I put the vest on and we went to the market by a minibus, but she gave me peach juice before leaving, and I soon felt dizzy and started to see double,” Raniya said. “I knew there was a bomb, because I saw the wires, but they told me I would not be blown up.”
“We arrived in the market and they left me there, saying they would do some shopping,” she said.
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