Suicide bomber exchange?

Not to make light of this, but color me perplexed. Syria is harboring training sites for non-Iraqis to learn how to blow themselves up in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Nov. 13 -- Top Iraqi defense officials on Sunday accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to operate training camps on Syrian soil and sneak into Iraq to commit suicide bombings.

"We do not have the least doubt that nine out of 10 of the suicide bombers who carry out suicide bombing operations among Iraqi citizens . . . are Arabs who have crossed the border with Syria," the Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie, told journalists in Cairo, the Reuters news service reported.

"Most of those who blow themselves up in Iraq are Saudi nationals," he added.

Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi also criticized Syria.

"We have more than 450 detainees who came from different Arab and Muslim countries to train in Syria and enter with their booby-trapped vehicles into Iraq to bring destruction and killings," Dulaimi said after meeting with Jordanian Prime Minister Adnan Badran in Amman, according to the Associated Press.

"Let me tell the Syrians that if the Iraqi volcano explodes, no neighboring capital will be saved," Dulaimi said, warning that the aim of terrorists was "to kill tolerance and destroy coexistence in Arab and Muslim cities."

And, meanwhile, Iraqi nationals are entering Jordan to blow themselves up there.

AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 14 -- She twirled, almost like a model showing off the latest fashion, her waist a thick belt of translucent tape with crude red wires attached. Her hands pumped a black cylinder of plastic, a switch that should have blown her up in a burst of flame and metal but did not.

In a televised confession broadcast on state-run Jordanian television Sunday, Sajida Rishawi, 35, an Iraqi from the city of Fallujah, described how her husband pushed her out of a ballroom at the Radisson SAS Hotel in the Jordanian capital when her contraption failed to explode. His vest detonated, and a ball of flames ripped through the crowded hall.

Rishawi modeled the suicide vest she allegedly wore to carry out the attack. She spun around, showing how it should have worked. At times, the camera focused on her hands, which she wrung as she spoke to an unidentified interviewer, presumably an interrogator.

Rishawi was arrested Sunday morning for allegedly taking part in suicide bombings here Wednesday that killed 57 people at three hotels and jolted a population used to relative security.

Jordanian intelligence had been tracking Rishawi since the night of the bombing, officials said, when an alert was issued that a potential suspect wearing a black dress was seen running from the scene of the Radisson bombing, where 200 people had gathered for a wedding.

Two days later, al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent group led by Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, posted a statement on its Web site asserting that three men and a woman married to one of them had died carrying out the coordinated attacks that struck the Grand Hyatt, Radisson and Days Inn hotels in downtown Amman. The statement said the woman, whom it did not name, "chose to accompany her husband to his martyrdom."

And to think, that flypaper strategy once seemed so promising.