The women who become bombers are disturbingly voiceless here.

There are serious — one might even say insurmountable — challenges that face a reporter who wants to interview a woman who has successfully become a suicide bomber.

The article almost seems to imply that the insurgents are the ones doing the rape, and then turning around and manipulating the victims. Yet, if the rapes are done by US or other occupying forces, it opens the door for many more motives than shame over being raped. Revenge, for example against the occupiers who have done the harm, by undermining the occupation. Or justice, using your last act to punish those who have harmed you, when no other type of justice is available.

The women who become bombers are disturbingly voiceless here. We here from one who claims to have persuaded them to bomb, framing her arguments in language acceptable and nonthreatening to the men around her. A sexually assaulted woman is shamed, and must act to redeem herself in some way. They raped, they are shamed, they are manipulated, and they are without agency every step of the way, according to the narrative given, even when the act may well be one of reclaiming agency when both invader and neighbor are allied against them.

There’s a fair amount of information coming out of Iraq, but if you look closely, most of it is from men. We don’t hear a lot from or about women and what we do hear (resurgence of honor killings since the invasion, for example) is not good.

I find this story totally believable, and I’m not a bit surprised this is the only place we’ve heard of it.

The US military has number of about 1/3 of ITS OWN females being raped. This sounds more like a problem of militaristic patriarchal culture.

Satriani having no motivation to try to make Iranians or Muslims look bad, given that she is one, I found this horrifyingly plausible. And since I have read stories of Iraqi women who were rescued from kidnappers and returned to their families being murdered by said families because they *might* have been raped… I completely believe this story.

The rest of what she said, recruiting three-fourths of the female bombers and stuff, maybe not so much. But the idea that the insurgents would rape a woman and then tell her that the only way she can evade the shame of being “ruined” is to nobly sacrifice her life? Totally plausible, given the culture. There might be less cognitive dissonance and less reason for the woman to resist if they don’t know *who* raped them, and the person who persuades them to salvage their honor by blowing themselves up is this woman… but I suspect that even if they know they are being raped by the insurgents, the idea of blowing themselves up to save their public reputation is *still* more attractive than living as a known rape victim.

I think a lot of the claims are questionable, though that doesn’t mean they’re false: she claims to have recruited 3/4 of the female suicide bombers in Iraq which sounds a stretch, and the idea that she personally walked the bombers to their targets does not seem likely. What really sounds my BS-detector though is the fact that she was allowed to give a press interview. How many captured insurgents are allowed to do that? With the police in the adjoining room it seems likely that she was allowed to do the interview on the condition that she makes the insurgents sound as bad as possible (perhaps as part of an informal plea deal); and that makes exaggerations and fictions somewhat likely.

But it’s very true that rape is under-reported and used as a tool of war in Iraq and elsewhere, and the veracity of this woman’s account doesn’t make that any less true. I just think it’s interesting to speculate on what was actually going on in the interview room.