IRAQ: Security forces say they have arrested a female militant who recruited more than two dozen female suicide bombers

Record ID: 357351

  • Title: IRAQ: Security forces say they have arrested a female militant who recruited more than two dozen female suicide bombers
  • Date: 5th February 2009
  • Summary: WOUNDED IN HOSPITAL AFTER SUICIDE ATTACK CARRIED OUT BY A WOMAN IN IRAQ.
  • Embargoed: 20th February 2009 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Iraq
  • Country: Iraq
  • Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement
  • Reuters ID: LVA1RMCYWY8HLZD5SPWO25KE9YP1
  • Story Text: Iraqi forces said on Tuesday (February 3) they had captured a woman who confessed to training more than 28 female suicide bombers who conducted attacks across Iraq.
    Al-Qaeda and other Sunni Islamist groups have increasingly dispatched women and girls on suicide bombing missions because they are less likely to be detected in searches, a once-rare tactic that became more common in 2007 and 2008.
    Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim al-Moussawi said the woman, Samira Ahmed Jassim, was a member of the Sunni Arab militant Islamist group Ansar al-Sunna and was captured at an undisclosed location two weeks ago.

    "Iraqi forces captured on Wednesday January 21, 2009, the terrorist Samira Ahmed Jassim, known as Um al-Mumineen, who is responsible for recruiting female suicide bombers," he told a news conference.

    "She confessed to training more than 28 female suicide bombers, all of whom conducted terrorist operations in different parts of Iraq,"
    he added.
    He played a video in which Jassim, a middle-aged woman in a traditional black robe, appeared to confess to training a female bomber who attacked a police station in Diyala.
    ''I met with Harith who told me that he needed me to recruit women for him. The first woman was Um Huda, I spoke to her a few times and then I sent a message to him that I have a woman like this, they said 'get her'," she said.
    Suicide and car bombs remain routine despite a sharp drop in militant attacks and in the sectarian bloodshed between Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority and minority Sunni Arabs who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein.
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