The woman who Isis wants released from a Jordanian jail, in return for Japanese hostage Kenji Goto, has family ties with Iraq’s most violent militant groups.
Sajida al-Rishawi, 44, is a failed suicide bomber who travelled to Jordan from Ramadi in Iraq in 2005.
She has been on death row in Jordan since long before Isis was created.
Goto asked for the prisoner swap in an Isis audio tape released at the weekend, when he referred to her as the group’s “imprisoned sister”.
“It is simple. You give them Sajida and I will be released,” Goto said on the video.
Isis often calls members and supporters brothers or sisters, but the word may carry more weight here.
Her brother was a close aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, the group that eventually mutated into today’s Isis, and two other brothers died fighting US forces.
Zarqawi, a ferocious advocate of sectarian violence so extreme that it even frayed ties with Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi was killed in 2006. But he is still admired by Isis followers.
He sent Rishawi to Jordan in 2005, along with her husband and three other men, to bomb a string of hotels in the city.
They killed 57 and injured 90, but Rishawi appears to have left a crucial part of her suicide bomb in their car and so survived.
She fled from the bombed hotel, disguised in a crowd of panicked guests, and was picked up in a safe house soon after.
In a televised confession, the Iraqi woman admitted heading to the attack on a wedding party with absolute clarity and a chilling lack of empathy or remorse.
“There was a wedding at the hotel with children, women and men inside,” she said.
“My husband detonated [his bomb] and I tried to explode my belt but it wouldn’t. People fled running and I left running with them.”
She is the first woman ever to be sentenced to death by Jordan’s state security court.
