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Creating female suicide bombers through systematic rape:

From Iraq comes news of the televized prison confession of Samira Ahmed Jassim al-Azzawi, a shopkeeper born in 1958 and the mother of four, telling about her alleged role in recruiting more than 80 young Iraqi women as suicide bombers, 28 of whom actually went on to carry out attacks.

Her method of recruitment? Organizing their rape in order to exploit the deep shame associated with rape in Muslim society in order to push the victims to forfeit their lives as suicide bombers, thereby somewhat redeeming their lost honor.

The Daily Mail quotes Jassim:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1138298/Face-face-women-suicide-bombers.html?printingPage=true

"I was able to persuade them to become martyrs. Many of the women were broken, depressed, especially those who were raped." The paper goes on to explain that "Jassim's role was to manipulate these rape victims - persuading them they would be better off dead. And once the women had volunteered to become suicide bombers, she delivered them back to insurgents ready for death."

Al-Jazeera quotes Jassim
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/02/200923195547936438.html
telling about one specific victim, Amal, a teacher who had problems with her husband and his family:

I met Amal and we stayed together for more than two weeks. I talked to her until I convinced her she was in a bad situation - as she had been treated badly by her husband and brothers. She was mentally exhausted. I then took her to see my contacts, then received her back from them at the same delivery place. This is where she then blew herself up".

The New York Times
http://www.danielpipes.org/admin/FCKeditor/editor/__British%20boycott.doc
focuses on an August 2007 suicide bombing that killed 12:

Jassim recounted the fate of a woman she called only Um Huda, whom she had led to a neighborhood bank that served as her rendezvous point. "When I was talking to her, she was not answering or looking at me," Ms. Jassim said. "She was mumbling verses of the Koran." "I got her to the bank and left her there," she went on, unemotionally. "She detonated herself at a police station in Muqdadiya."

The Times of London
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article5661466.ece
provides more details about the modus operandi of Umm al-Mu'minin, "the Mother of the Believers,":

Jassim is heard in the video apparently confessing to training a female bomber who attacked a police station in Diyala. "I was introduced to her, I began talking to her," she said. She had to talk to one elderly woman several times before persuading her to blow herself up at a bus station, she added. … US officials have said that recruiters often pick on vulnerable women whose husbands have been killed in the violence that consumed Iraq since the invasion. Some even marry the woman and then convert her into a suicide bomber.

Jassim's arrest is no small matter, for female suicide bombers have been a major tactic for al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Sunnah, and other terrorist groups in Iraq to get through the security forces. Checkpoints are typically run by male guards and social imperatives prevent them from frisking women, permitting the latter to carry out operations, especially as their long black robes offer plenty of space to conceal explosives.

Jassim faces the death penalty if found guilty.

(February 6, 2009)