IS swap demand, a long forgotten prisoner

Sajida al-Rishawi spent her honeymoon staging an attack on a Jordanian wedding that killed 27 guests

During the nine years that Sajida al-Rishawi, 46, has been sitting in self-imposed solitary confinement in her cell at the Juweidah Women’s Prison in Jordan, refusing to mix with other prisoners, she has had hardly any visitors, other than her court-appointed lawyer.

In all that time, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had dispatched her to Jordan to kill, has only rarely mentioned her, especially after that group morphed into the Islamic State. She was that ultimate embarrassment, the suicide bomber who was unable to complete her mission.

Now the militants are suddenly demanding the release of al-Rishawi, who spent her honeymoon helping stage an attack on a Jordanian wedding, where 27 guests were killed by her newlywed husband after he succeeded in detonating his explosive vest. The militants said they would free a Japanese hostage in exchange.

On Wednesday, Jordanian officials said they would let al-Rishawi go. But they put their own twist on the deal, saying they would do so only if the militants freed a Jordanian air force pilot shot down over Syria last month, becoming the first member of the US-led coalition fighting the IS to be captured.

Less than a week ago, the IS had valued two Japanese hostages at $100 million each. But after killing one of them on Saturday, the group changed its ultimatum: dropping the ransom demand and insisting instead that al-Rishawi be released in exchange for the remaining Japanese man. A later statement attributed to the IS added a new warning, that the pilot, 1st Lt Muath al-Kaseasbeh, would be killed if al-Rishawi was not released within 24 hours.

On Wednesday, the militants appeared to extend that deadline by a day, but they still have not said they would free al-Kaseasbeh as the Jordanians demanded, only that they would not kill him if al-Rishawi was released. As the crisis dragged on, the question that baffled Jordanians and terrorism experts alike was, as one analyst put it, “Why Sajida?”

“She has no value whatsoever, no social, no political, no security value whatsoever,” said Linda Maieah, a Jordanian journalist who covers extremists, and who interviewed al-Rishawi in prison. “If IS wanted her, they would have asked for her from the first day,” Maieah said. “For nine years, no one ever asked for her. Even her own tribe didn’t care about her.”

Although the reason for the apparent change of heart by the militants remains unclear, it may be that al-Rishawi embodies the evolution of al-Qaeda in Iraq to its present incarnation as the IS. The militants seem to be re-purposing “Sister Sajida” as a hero hailing from its early days. Al-Rishawi was among four suicide bombers who carried out the November 9, 2005, attacks on three hotels in Amman, killing at least 57 people, including those attending the wedding party that she and her newlywed husband, Ali Shumari, attacked. 

“She was seen as a dupe, even if she showed no remorse, it’s not like she exuded a lot of ideological energy, none at all, in fact,” said Joost Hiltermann, who is in charge of the West Asia for the International Crisis Group.

“People see her as a very lesser person.” She is so poorly regarded, in fact, that Jordanians, in government and out, seemed to have reached a consensus that al-Rishawi was not worth keeping in prison, when there was the possibility of saving their pilot’s life by releasing her. 

Even Ashraf al-Khaled, the groom at the wedding she attacked, said he and his entire surviving family were willing to see her swapped. “She’s a nobody; I don’t think she’s very important,” he said.

“If it’s 100 per cent sure to get Muath back, we support this, even though I know if she’s released she will probably do this again.” Al-Khaled lost his father in the attack; his wife lost both her parents.

Sajida al-Rishawi hardly came across as a firebrand, although she told interrogators she was motivated by vengeance for deaths in her family. She had been married once before, in her early 30s, unusually late in Anbar province in Iraq and among the semirural Rishawi tribe she came from. According to Hassan Abu Hanieh, a scholar of Islamist movements, her first husband was a Jordanian member of al-Qaeda in Iraq named Abu Anas al-Urdoni, who was killed fighting the Americans in Fallujah in 2003 or 2004.

In rapid succession in 2004, her eldest brother, Thamer, and two other brothers, Yassir and Ammar, were killed by the US military.

Hanieh and Maieah both said it was her eldest brother’s death that most affected her. While she was illiterate and worked at a vegetable stand, her brother Thamer had risen to become a close aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who led al-Qaeda in Iraq. After the deaths of her brothers, al-Rishawi volunteered for a vengeance mission and was recruited early in 2005 for the planned operation attacking hotels in Amman.

The IS’s recent demand for her release is a reminder that the group is a direct descendant of al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq. After al-Zarqawi’s death, other leaders came to the fore, including a fellow member of the group’s governing council, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who is now the leader of the IS.

“She represents the first generation of IS, and one of the first women suiciders,” Hanieh said. “That makes her very important to them, and they revere Zarqawi.”

Jordan in awkward situation

Hiltermann, however, said he would have thought IS would have picked more important militants held by Jordan. As many as 60 other alleged IS or al-Qaeda prisoners are held by Jordan, including Ziad al-Karbouli, who was al-Zarqawi’s top lieutenant at the time of the Jordanian attack and is believed to have helped plan the bombings. 

For her part, Maieah said al-Rishawi was “just a malicious, sneaky low-life,” adding that “the only reason she was there is a man couldn’t have gotten into a wedding alone.” Her theory is that the militants are “just doing this to put Jordan in an awkward situation with Japan.”

Japan is a major aid donor to Jordan and has pledged $150 million in aid to help Jordan manage more than 6,00,000 refugees from Syria whose presence has put a strain on Jordan’s resources and raised the spectre of unrest.

The demand for al-Rishawi’s release has also put Jordan in an awkward situation with its own public, which has been demanding that something be done for al-Kaseasbeh – and complaining that the Japanese journalist should not get precedence. So far, the IS militants have appeared to promise only to spare al-Kaseasbeh’s life, not to release him, although they have said they would release the Japanese hostage, Kenji Goto, a journalist.

With a growing chorus of Jordanians, led by al-Kaseasbeh’s father, complaining that the US-led fight against IS should not be Jordan’s war, some analysts worry that Jordan’s continued participation in the coalition could even be put into question. In that case, al-Rishawi’s extremist supporters may finally have found a use for her – whether or not she gets released.