Profiles in Killing

For Raed al Bena, 30, a Jordanian who blew himself up somewhere in Iraq, the grudge was very personal—and very petty. Raed hardly would have aroused any profiler's suspicions. After working for the United Nations in Jordan, he obtained a student visa to the United States and went to Los Angeles; there he got a job at the Los Angeles International (LAX) airport. Although his visa did not allow him to work, he nevertheless passed security checks, his family says.  After a brief visit to Jordan, he returned to the U.S. and an immigration officer in Chicago stopped him. When she realized he had been working instead of studying, she expelled him on the spot. "He was distraught when he came back," says his father, Mansour al Bena. "He said, 'This woman destroyed my future'."  For a few months he lay around at home, going out at night and frittering away his savings, living large.  Then he made some new friends and started going with them to pray daily. "When you see your son going every day to mosque, you feel relieved," Mansour said, not realizing he had fallen in with a group of Salafis from Salt, a town in Jordan famous for Islamic extremism.  One day in January 2005 Raed told his parents he was going to Saudi Arabia to work. On March 1, Mansour's other son got a mysterious call from an unknown number: "We are your brothers from Iraq, from Mosul. We want to inform you of the martyrdom of Raed." The terrorists confirmed the message by saying that Raed wanted them to pass along his apology to a friend for not repaying $100 that he owed. When word got out, several sheikhs showed up at the family's home during the mourning ceremonies to express their happiness.  Mansour says he rejected them, though Jordanian press reports described the family as celebrating joyfully.  Listening to all this, Raed's mother, Nareman, flared up. "Why do you say 'suicide bomb'? It's 'martyrdom'. One who wants to commit suicide will kill himself in the house. As long as there's invasion and occupation, this will happen." It's unclear where Raed died; those who called said he had been martyred in Mosul, but no successful suicide operations were reported there during that period. Some officials think he was the suicide bomber who killed 123 civilians in Hilla around that time.

Then there's the jailed Sarida Arishawy. Her lawyer, Hussein al Masna says she's a woman with "dead eyes" who tried during the trial to depict herself as mentally disturbed, but neither he nor the court believed her. What they did believe was that all three of her brothers had been killed fighting in Iraq, and she herself was unmarried at 36. "She was an ugly woman, for an ugly deed," al Masna says. "Al Qaeda found her a husband. There's an Arabic saying: you can't be forced to drink water." As for her own marriage, says al Masna: it was never consummated.

—With reporting by Newsweek's Iraqi staff

© 2007