[Richard]

How Baida Wanted to Die
Aliss Rubin, NYT, 12 Aug 2009
Pg 2 of 3

Executing a successful suicide bombing is rarely a lone act. It requires preparing a suicide vest, teaching the would-be bomber how to use it and planning the mission. It means transporting the bomber close to the place where she will carry out the attack and in some cases setting up a camera nearby so that the event can be filmed. For women, who rarely drive in Iraq, except in Baghdad, it would be impossible to get to the bomb site without assistance. Most of the women who blew themselves up in Diyala were supported and trained by a network of extremists — often family members already active in the insurgency.

Baida told me she felt much more helpless after her father died. Until then, when she was unhappy with her husband, she would go to visit her family, although they had moved by then to Husayba, the Syrian border town. Sometimes she was so upset at home that she would call one of her brothers or cousins to come to Baquba and drive her to her father’s. “You see, when my father was alive, he loved us a lot,” she said wistfully. “So when I quarreled with my husband, I felt safe because I had my father.”

After her brothers and father were killed, she began to work with some of her cousins; they were also fighters and even more radical Islamists than her brothers. One of them died in a suicide attack, but not before introducing her to a group, run from Syria, that was connected to the Islamic State of Iraq. A goal of the group was to prepare men and women for suicide missions. “Maybe I can introduce you to them,” she said warmly. “You could go meet them since they are free.”

BAIDA, HAVING JOINED the group, initially did not plan to become a suicide bomber. She was drawn to it gradually as she became more deeply involved with the cell. Her cell members announced their readiness for a suicide mission in front of others in the group, making a public commitment, signaling they had crossed an invisible border and embraced the idea of a certain kind of death that would also bring membership in a holy community.

The group dynamic seemed designed to make participants feel as if they were freely choosing their destiny. That sense of freedom was an important component of their metamorphosis into suicide bombers. It was certainly important to Baida, who felt she controlled little in her life, to feel in control of her death. Her goal was to take revenge on her brothers’ killers — American soldiers. When I brought up the reality that the vast majority of suicide bombings in Iraq kill ordinary Iraqis, she would only say that she thought killing Iraqis was haram, or forbidden.

“We had meetings of 11 people; some people came to the meeting with their faces covered,” Baida told me. “There were three women in the group. Sometimes we were having discussions of Koran, sometimes we were meeting to see who is ready to do jihad. You could choose whether you wanted to do it. They wanted me to wear the explosive belt against the police, but I refused. I said, ‘I will not do it against Iraqis.’ I said: ‘If I do it against the police I will go to hell because the police are Muslims. But if I do it against the Americans then I will go to heaven.’ ”

A few weeks later, when I met Baida again, she tried to explain to me the line dividing when it is halal (permitted) to kill a person and when it is forbidden. She said she followed the rules of her group, but her cousins had different rules: they would kill anybody. Was there a difference, I wondered, between killing American soldiers and killing American civilians, like reconstruction workers? No, she said: “I am willing to explode them, even civilians, because they are invaders and blasphemers and Jewish. I will explode them first because they are Jewish and because they feel free to take our lands.”

My interpreter asked where she stood: Was it halal to kill her?

“We consider you a spy, working with them,” Baida said.

Baida did not believe it was halal, however, to kill members of the Iraqi security forces if they were working on their own, only if they were in a convoy with the Americans.

She spoke with enthusiasm, her face animated, vividly alive. Unlike her prison companion Ranya — who claimed, implausibly, that she did not know that she was wearing a suicide belt — Baida was proud of her mission and determined to complete it.

Her choice of suicide was not entirely hers to make. The suicide vests the cell gave to participants were outfitted with remote detonators so that someone else could explode the would-be bomber if she somehow failed to do it herself. This was a relatively new aspect of suicide bombing in Iraq. A second person, with a second detonator, would go on the mission to ensure against changes of heart. “One day this woman, Shaima, said, ‘I am ready.’ I saw Shaima when they put the vest on her. It was very heavy. With Shaima, they exploded her, she did not explode herself. There were five or six killed.”

By the time I met Baida she was eager to get on with her mission, waiting for the day when she would be released from jail and able to pick up her vest, which she said was being kept for her. (She has yet to be charged with any crime.) She appeared to have let go of most earthly ties. A mother of two boys and a girl, all under 8, she had not seen them since her arrest last year. When I asked if they missed her, she said, almost airily, “Allah will take care of them.” She spoke as if much of her life was already in the past. When she mentioned her husband, whom she actively hated, she used the past tense. She was living for that moment that some might see as an ending but for her would be a moment of transformation.

“As soon as I get out I will explode myself against the invaders,” she told me.

A few moments before we left, I asked when it would be convenient to come see her again. She said she was being moved soon to a psychiatric hospital in Baghdad, and she was afraid. I promised her we would visit her there and asked how we could get in touch. It turned out that she had smuggled a cellphone into the jail — or perhaps appealed to some guard not to take it from her. She never left the sim card in the phone; it was hidden in her underwear, she said. One time, the phone itself was discovered — she had hidden it in a ceiling-light fixture — and confiscated, but she still had the sim card and had somehow got access to another phone.

“They don’t know,” she said softly, nodding at the policemen in the room, who were staring at a music video. I felt a wave of unease. She was not a beginner.

THE ROAD TO the Abu Sayda district in Diyala should cross a giant highway bridge, but it was bombed more than a year ago and has yet to be repaired. Cars snake single file into a deep gully, travel parallel to a line of towering girders and eventually crawl up the other side of the ravine. The district lies near a bend in the Diyala River, and many of the farms and villages are cut off on three sides by water, making it a haven for insurgents.

One of the district’s villages is Makhisa, which was home to at least three women who became suicide bombers. A settlement on the edge of Makhisa was for many years the home of Baida’s cellmate, Ranya Ibrahim. It had the dubious distinction of being the town favored by the notorious Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Police told me that he married a woman from Makhisa and sometimes stayed in the village until he was killed on June 7, 2006.

The town, set among thick date-palm and pomegranate orchards, consists of little more than a few streets lined with low slung, mostly rickety houses, many with simple palm-thatch porches. On the outskirts, one in every four vehicles is a wooden horse-drawn wagon. The animals pull canisters filled with gas used for cooking, transport wood and serve as an informal bus service for local women and children. The most recent suicide bombing near here occurred this spring. It killed at least 47 people, many of them Iranian Shiite pilgrims.

Until 2007, it was too dangerous for the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police to enter the area. When they finally did, they found a strange community. “When we entered Makhisa we didn’t find a TV because it’s forbidden,” Col. Khalid Mohammed al-Ameri, who was in the army under Saddam Hussein and has served all over the country, told me. “And no ice, no cigarettes and no tomatoes and cucumbers mixed together at the same shop.”

The strictest Sunni extremists believe that people should not have anything that did not exist in the early days of Islam. Since there was no electricity in the seventh century, there could be neither refrigeration nor ice and no television. The aversion to mixing tomatoes and cucumbers is because cucumbers are viewed as a male vegetable and tomatoes are female, and mixing them in a box is seen as lascivious, Colonel Khalid said, shaking his head.

(cont'd)