From The Daily Mail Kevin Toolis is the director of Channel 4's Cult Of The Suicide Bomber series
Some are raped, others ruthlessly brainwashed. In this exclusive dispatch, KEVIN TOOLIS meets the women who become Al Qaeda's human bombs.
Dressed from head-to-toe in black, seemingly invisible and blending in with the shimmering heat of the Middle East, she is the perfect weapon: the female suicide bomber.
There is no real defence against her. In traditional Arab society it is haram  -  forbidden  -  for a man to shake hands never mind search a strange woman, even at a security checkpoint.
In the latest spate of deadly attacks across Iraq, Al Qaeda-style insurgents have turned to women to deliver their murderous message, killing at least 445 people and injuring thousands over the past two years.
But how could a woman from a traditional Islamic society turn herself into a human bomb?
We all know that the male suicide bomber is promised 72 virgins in the gardens of paradise. What, then, does a female 'martyr' get in return for her suicide?
Haggard, scowling, as she stares at the prison camera, Samira Ahmed Jassim, a middle-aged Iraqi shopkeeper, hardly seems the type to inspire dozens of young women to blow themselves up.
Suicide bombing is never just a personal act. There is always a network, a recruiter. It was under the codename 'Mother of the Believers' that Jassim groomed her recruits for death.
Jassim, a mother of four, explained she played on the women's sense of shame. 'I was able to persuade them to become martyrs. Many of the women were broken, depressed, especially those who were raped.'
She even claimed some of the women had been deliberately raped by insurgents in order to then turn them into suicide bombers.
It is hard to think of a more pitiless form of warfare.
You rape and mentally torture your victim and then, with the aid of a hateful old crone like Jassim, convince them to kill themselves on your behalf.
But in the Middle East, with its fusion of religion, hatred and bloodshed, every human evil is possible.
The 'honour' of the family in traditional Arab society is built on the concept of the chastity of the women in the family.
Women are controlled by men  -  their fathers and brothers initially, and then their husband and his brothers, who monitor and supervise every aspect of their lives. A woman is the possession of the men in her family.
Rape is the deadliest assault on this honour code. But few sympathise with the victim herself.
Whatever the circumstances, rape victims are almost always blamed for bringing shame to their family by somehow provoking her attackers.
Or simply by being somewhere away from the protection of the male members of the family.
In a marriage culture that prizes virginity, a rape victim will never find a husband and never recover from the sexual shame. It is a living death.
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.
As your body is blown to pieces you will feel no pain. And all your sins, the shame of your rape or adultery, will be cleansed in an instant. If you blow yourself up you'll go straight to Jenna  -  the green fields of paradise.
Female suicide bombing is not an easy phenomenon to study but, aside from the extraordinary confession of Samira Ahmed Jassim in Baghdad, there is a place where you can discover the truth from the women themselves.
Surrounded by armed guards, barbed wire and dogs, Israel's Hasharon prison is a forbidding place.
But deep within its walls is the world's only jail for failed female suicide bombers  -  arrested by the Israeli security forces on their way to blow themselves up.
Nicknamed the 'living tomb' by its inmates and packed with more than 100 failed female 'martyrs', Unit 12 is a grim but fascinating institution.
I spent more than a month there researching Channel 4's Cult Of The Suicide Bomber series talking to these Palestinian women about how they were recruited and why they wanted to kill themselves.
And, although recruitment techniques might not have been as barbaric as rape in every case, they were just as effective.
Among the most chilling inmates was Manal Saba'na, a striking 22-year-old with pale skin and arched eyebrows, who comes from a picturesque village near the West Bank town of Jenin.
But Manal was unique for another reason  -  she had recruited her two best friends, Sabrine, 22, and Ayat, 19, to be suicide bombers.
As we discovered, most of the failed female suicide bombers in the prison came from fractured or broken families. Their fathers were dead, elderly, or sick.  The prisoners' mothers were often second wives  -  20 years younger than their husbands.
In Arab society any unauthorised contact between a woman and strange men would be seen as a slight on the honour of her family.  Her brothers and father would be compelled to seek revenge. But Manal, as a woman, could easily groom Sabrine for death over morning coffee.  The dead father, her murdered brother and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land  -  they were all easy psychological buttons to hit.
Manal recruited Ayat at a family wedding when the two women were briefly alone. Manal told Ayat she would have to wait for the right time  -  but Manal knew she now had another would-be martyr in waiting.
Manal's plan was to use Sabrine to blow up a Jerusalem restaurant.
Instead, they were all arrested and sentenced to between four and five years in Hasharon.
In her cell I asked Sabrine what was going to happen to her in paradise after she had blown herself up.
'In paradise the male martyr gets 72 virgins but the female martyr becomes queen of those virgins. The rest of the virgins are her maids and they wait on her. She is the best and most beloved.'
Queen of the Virgins? It seems almost childish, and beyond the prison walls Ayat's confidence in her parent's forgiveness was ill-founded.
'If I had known what Ayat was planning I would have told the Jews. I would have stopped her,' said Ahmed Kmeil, her father.
'In our religion it is forbidden for a girl's body to be uncovered even at home. How could a girl allow her body to be smashed to pieces and then collected up by Jews? This is absolutely forbidden.'
Even Manal's family insisted that female suicide bombing is wrong.
'With a man it's different. For us, a girl can't show her leg or wear a short T-shirt. How can you then be a good Muslim woman and expose your body to the world? What Manal was doing recruiting those girls was wrong,' said her mother Nadia Saba'na.
But what was shocking was none of the families of the would-be female suicide bombers expressed outrage about the innocent civilians their daughters would have killed.
They did not seem to be particularly concerned about their daughter's death. What they were worried about was pieces of their daughter's body being exposed to strangers, or worse still, to Jews. They saw everything through this false prism of 'honour'.
The same lessons, of course, apply in Iraq.
But the even greater truth is that raped, shamed, and psychologically manipulated, Iraq's female suicide bombers are, all too often, not seeking paradise but fleeing the hell of their lives on Earth.
My understanding is that for a woman to escape the torments of hell, described by Mohammed as full of women who did not submit properly to their menfolk, is sufficient reward alone to make it a not unattractive prospect.