Profiles in Killing

Sajida Arishawy is in a Jordanian jail now, singing English pop tunes to herself as she waits in solitary confinement to see if her death sentence is carried out.  Her lawyer calls her "the bride of Al Qaeda," the woman who married another terrorist so they could travel together legally under Islamic law. Their honeymoon plans: blow up a Jordanian wedding party.

Those plans succeeded with devastating effect. Arishawy and her husband, both Iraqis, were among four bombers who came to Jordan to blow up three hotels in Amman in the Nov. 2005 attack that would take 57 lives. The Arishawy couple took part in the deadliest part of that attack—at the Days Inn, where he was to take out the groom's side and she the bride's side. Her bomb, however, failed to explode; she claimed later that both her main detonator, a button, and a back-up pull cord, failed to activate.

Suicide bombers don't fall into easy categories. Like most stereotypes, the one that they are usually impoverished, disaffected young men with few prospects is often, but not always, true. "If you're living in hell, why not go to paradise," says Saif al din Ali Ahmed, chief of security for the Kurdish regional government in Suleimaniya, explaining what might prompt Iraqis to take up arms.  But women like Arishawy are more than the exception that prove the rule. "They [insurgent leaders] are getting very well-off people with great potential to carry out attacks," says Hadi Ameri, head of the security committee in the Iraqi Parliament.

NEWSWEEK has interviewed the families of some who carried out murderous missions, or tried to. Some are mourning the loss of their loved ones, others are jubilant at what they see as a magnificent martyrdom.

Didar Khalid was one of the dimmer perpetrators. A would-be bomber wearing a suicide vest, he approached a group of policemen in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, in 2004. Seeing him wearing an overcoat on a hot day, one of the officers pointed his gun at him and shouted, "Put up your hands", and he did. The cops quickly grabbed his arms before he could push the button. Khalid's arrest led authorities there to roll up the bomber's entire cell, nine members who included finance, explosives, indoctrination and surveillance experts.  NEWSWEEK photographed them in a Kurdish lockup near Suleimaniya, but was not allowed to identify them.

At a higher end of the intelligence scale was Ahmed Said Ahmed al-Ghamdi, 20, a medical student in the Sudan, whose father was reportedly a Saudi diplomat. Al-Ghamdi was identified by the international Arabic al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper as the suicide bomber who blew himself up in the middle of the mess hall at a U.S. military base in Mosul, killing 22, most of them U.S. servicemen — the single biggest loss of American life on a military base. Al-Ghamdi carried out his Dec., 21, 2004, attack in an explosives-laden vest and carrying a bag full of shrapnel in the form of ball bearings. He had been recruited by Ansar al-Sunna, an extremist group which claimed responsibility for the attack on Web postings showing a video of both the bomber and the explosion's aftermath.  Three other members of the large al-Ghamdi tribe in Saudi Arabia were among the suicide hijackers recruited to carry out the 9/11 attacks in the United States.