The Puzzle Of the Suicide Bomber

For a woman who recently escaped death, Sajida Rishawi seemed oddly calm during her appearance this week on Jordanian television. Wearing a white headscarf, speaking in a monotone and explaining that "my husband is the one who organized everything, I don't know anything else," she described how she and her husband, an Iraqi linked to the insurgent Abu Musab Zarqawi, had crossed the border of Iraq into Jordan, made their way to Amman, and prepared carefully: "He had two explosive belts. He made me wear one and he wore the other and taught me how to use it, how to pull and control it."

From there, the couple took a taxi to a hotel where "there was a wedding and there were women and children." Her husband stood in one corner, Rishawi stood in another. Her husband pulled his cord. "I tried to detonate and it failed. People fled running and I left running with them." Thirty-eight people died in that blast, mostly Jordanians and Palestinians.

Sajida Rishawi on Jordanian TV. (Associated Press) Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. Daily Pundit Full List of Blogs (1 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On washingtonpost.com | On the web

Thanks to the modern miracle of online video links, it is possible to watch Rishawi make that confession, over and over again. You can observe her turning around slowly, showing off her suicide belt. You can listen for a hint of vocal inflection or look for a note of emotion in her face. What you cannot do is learn why she did it.

But perhaps that's not surprising. In the four years since the most famous suicide bombing in history, our explanations of what motivates suicide bombers haven't grown any simpler. Certainly the old stereotype of a suicide bomber as someone ill-educated or illiterate was shattered by the life story of Mohamed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 plot, who defended a master's thesis in urban planning at his Hamburg university and who spoke German so well that he liked to correct the grammatical mistakes of native speakers. The notion that all suicide bombers are victims of poverty has been overturned too: One of the London bus bombers drove a Mercedes.

Even the cartoon image of the religious fanatic, the crazed young man convinced that he will be welcomed in heaven by a bevy of beautiful virgins, has fallen by the wayside. Rishawi is not the first woman to attempt to blow herself up: Ayat Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian girl, detonated an explosive belt at the entrance to a Jerusalem supermarket in 2002. Akhras was not only young and female, she also was relatively secular, on good terms with her family and engaged to be married.

Nor does "trauma" provide a satisfying explanation. According to her relatives, Rishawi was motivated by the deaths of her brothers in Iraq. But thousands of other Iraqi women also have brothers and husbands who have died in the fighting, and they would nevertheless be horrified by the thought of murdering a group of strangers. Ordinary psychological explanations are useful, but they aren't sufficient.