Alyssa Rubin explains how those poor, sweet, female suicide bombers are "driven by despair" and have lost a male relative or been imprisoned or, something or other, that has very little or nothing to do with Islam.

...Why so many women? Why now? In a particularly painful twist, the phenomenon seems to have arisen at least in part because of successes in detaining and killing local members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.

The women who become suicide bombers often have lost close male relatives — a husband, a brother, a son — in fighting, because they became suicide bombers themselves or because they were detained by American or Iraqi security forces.

Ms. Mutlaq was no exception: her older brother had already taken the same path, detonating a suicide vest on June 10 during a shootout with Iraqi government forces.

“If there’s one single trend that I see, it’s the women’s relationship with the male figures that were members of A.Q.I. and were captured or killed,” said a senior military analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing information that had not been released publicly.

The subordinate role of women in conservative, rural Sunni families in Diyala makes them particularly vulnerable to pressure, said Sajar Qaduri, a member of the Diyala Provincial Council and the only woman on its security committee.

“Although she is bombing herself and aiming to kill people, I feel these women are really victims of terrorism,” said Mrs. Qaduri, who is a Shiite and whose husband was kidnapped two years ago and has not been heard from since. “Only women in despair, in desperate situations, would do this. Dealing with such a phenomenon is not easy.”

She added: “Our Oriental society is not like your Western society. It seems in many of these cases the women have had their husband killed or sent to prison and she feels she has no choice, she is very depressed.” ...

She's "depressed." She has "no choice" but to strap on a suicide bomb vest and go out and commit mass murder because she's part of an "Oriental" society.

Interviews with police officers and politicians, American military analysts and Iraqi women yield different views of the phenomenon. But many agree that the province’s traditional, conservative and still largely rural society is a factor...

So, women from societies that are "traditional, conservative and rural," much like the American south, are prone to strapping on a suicide bomb vest and blowing up as many people a as possible every time they get "depressed?" Notice also that the choice of victims (could it be infidels and their collaborators?) seems to be omitted. Late in the article, the word Islam appears once.

Insurgent recruiters and religion instructors add promises to the threats, too, assuring people that they will go to paradise if they die fighting for Islam — a sometimes alluring dream for many in their largely poor, uneducated audience, said police officials and politicians in Diyala...

Is there any ordinary person left in America, outside the offices of the New Duranty Times and the White House that is, who still buys the line that being poor and uneducated creates the urge for psychotic mass murder?  This article is supposed to make us feel sorry for mass murderers - women who are murdering our boys in Iraq.

As Ibn Warraq says, Muslims are the first victims of Islam, but nevertheless, Muslims are murdering Westerners in the name of Islam and they simply must be stopped. Teaching them how to read and giving the working skills won't touch the problem, but the dreamy staff at New Duranty and the Pentagon and the White House, all seem to think if we poor billions of dollars into Iraq to raise the standard of living among Muslims all this will go away, as if the ten trillion dollars in oil revenues received by the Arab world since 1973 wasn't enough. What madness!