In Baquba, the Iraqi police detective flipped pointlessly through a file on his desk; the daylight was too faint to read by and the electricity had long since gone off. He seemed about to say something. Then a bomb exploded a few blocks away, and his office shook. The radios on his desk crackled. He nodded to his colleagues, and they ran into the hall to join police officers already rushing to the bomb site. As he rose to follow them, the detective tried to reassure me.
“You will like Baida,” Maj. Hosham al-Tamimi, then director of the National Investigation and Information Bureau in the Diyala Police Command, said as he nodded at the file before him. It was a curious thing to say about someone who sought to kill people like him and like me. He added, almost pensively: “I like Baida. She is” — he paused — “honest.”
Baida is one of 16 female would-be suicide-bomber suspects or accomplices who have been captured by the police in Diyala Province since the beginning of 2008; almost as many have blown themselves up. When I first met Baida in February, she had already been in jail more than two months. She was in the same cell with another would-be suicide bomber, Ranya, who was 15 when she was caught on her way to a bombing, her vest already strapped on. Ranya’s mother was also in the jail because she was believed to be connected to those involved in trying to organize Ranya’s death.
Nowhere, it seems, have more women blown themselves up in so short a time as in Iraq, where there have been some 60 suicide bombings attempted or carried out by women, the majority of them in 2007-8, according to statistics gathered by the American military and the Iraqi police. (The numbers, for men as well as women, are lower this year, though the attacks continue.) At least a third of those bombers came from Diyala, mostly from the provincial capital, Baquba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, or from a small stretch of land that lies in the Diyala River valley. Thick with date-palm groves, small rivers and lush fields, Diyala appears to be an oasis in the desert. But over the last four years it has been home to some of Iraq’s most violent terrorist factions. It was here and in Baghdad that the extremists’ most lethal weapons were honed. One of those was suicide bombers who were women.
IT IS DIFFICULT to learn much about suicide bombers since there is rarely anything left of them. In Diyala, however, because there have been so many bombers who were women, the police have been driven to study the phenomenon, developing a nuanced and thoughtful picture of women who resolve to kill themselves. It was with the help of the police, who were willing to give me access to some of the would-be bombers, that I reported this piece. In particular, working with my interpreter, an Iraqi woman who was trained as a social worker, I was able to have long and even intimate conversations with two of the women in police custody. Police officers were able to corroborate much of what they said.
Each woman’s story is unique, but their journeys to jihad do have commonalities. Many have lost close male relatives. Baida and Ranya lost both fathers and brothers. Many of the women live in isolated communities dominated by extremists, where radical understandings of Islam are the norm. In such places, women are often powerless to control much about their lives; they cannot choose whom they marry, how many children to have or whether they can go to school beyond the primary years. Becoming a suicide bomber is a choice of sorts that gives some women a sense of being special, with a distinguished destiny. But Major Hosham urged me not to generalize: “All the cases are different. Some are old; some are young; some are just criminals; some are believers. They have different reasons.”
One thing stood out: The appearance in Diyala of suicide bombers who were women was entwined with the appearance of the Islamic State of Iraq — the local face of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the umbrella name used in Iraq for homegrown Sunni extremist groups that have some foreign leadership. While many insurgent groups operate in Iraq, those with links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are associated with suicide bombings. In Diyala, the Islamic State of Iraq was particularly strong. It was also brutal and organized. It orchestrated mass kidnappings, mass executions, beheadings and ambushes. No one was spared: women or children; Sunnis, Shiites or Kurds. Whole villages were forced to flee; others fell under extremist control. Many of the women who became bombers were from families immersed in jihadist culture.
“One of the differences between suicide bombers in Iraq and Palestine is that the Islamists have not been involved much” in recruiting women in Palestine, says Mohammed Hafez, an associate professor of national-security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who specializes in Islamic extremist movements and recently wrote a book on suicide bombings in Iraq. “The Islamists have been very involved in Iraq. Also, in general there is a debate in the Islamic world about whether to use women and children, but in Iraq they have no hesitation about using women.”
The rise in the number of suicide bombers who were women in Iraq coincided with the expanding ability of the security forces to defeat bombers who were men. When, in 2006 and 2007, American and Iraqi forces began increasingly to use concrete barriers to insulate government buildings, markets and other gathering places from car bombs, the insurgents turned to women, who could use to advantage their traditional dress: a voluminous, floor-length black abaya, made of folds of flowing fabric. Tribal traditions and Arab notions of modesty make it unthinkable that the police or guards would search women. They could pass through even relatively robust security cordons as if they were invisible. They walked up the steps of government buildings, approached checkpoints and entered the offices and homes of people the militants wanted to assassinate.
Gradually, the police learned to look for telltale signs, Major Hosham told me. Women often wear double abayas to hide their suicide vests. And they apply heavy makeup, because they believe they are going to heaven and want to look their best.
Last September, the Iraqi government completed training for 27 policewomen in Diyala. The effort came too late to save at least 130 people and probably more who have died in the province in suicide bombings carried out by women.
MAJOR HOSHAM WAS right. I liked Baida immediately. She had an open face and pale skin, a medium build and an unassuming manner. She wore a traditional long black abaya whose only ornamental feature was a strip of black satin down the front. Her black veil was simple. A few strands of light brown hair strayed out, suggesting that while conservative she was not rigid. She seemed educated and told her story in a straightforward way. At times during our first meeting I would forget that we were in a cramped, dingy assistant detective’s office with scuffed paint and bars on the windows.
She began in a soft voice: “My name is Baida Abdul Karim al-Shammari, and I am from New Baquba near the general hospital. I am one of eight children; five were killed. The police raided our home. It was a half-hour before dawn during Ramadan. The Americans were with them.”
She added with a touch of pride: “My brothers were mujahideen. They made I.E.D.’s.” The word “mujahideen” means holy fighters and, in the context of Iraq, they are fighters against the infidels, the Americans. I.E.D.’s are improvised explosive devices.
She told me she helped make such devices, going to the market to buy wire and other bomb parts and working at putting bombs together. Men are routinely paid for such work; women are generally paid too, but less. Baida was proud to be a volunteer. “I knew we were fighting against the Americans and they are the occupation,” she told me. “We are doing it for God’s sake. We are doing it as jihad.”
Baida grew up shuttling between Baquba, which is the provincial capital of Diyala, and Husayba, a town on the Syrian border. She went to school through eighth grade, she told me, and had ideas of becoming an architect, but her mother wanted her to stay home. When Baida was 17, her mother died, and a few months later, at her father’s behest, Baida married. Almost immediately she knew she had made a mistake. A week after her wedding, according to Baida, her husband threw a cup of cream at her head; soon, beatings became regular. She smiled sweetly and shrugged: “His hand got used to beating me.”
For Baida, as for many Iraqi suicide bombers, violent insurgency was the family business. It was shortly after the American invasion that her brothers began to manufacture I.E.D.’s. One was killed when his handiwork exploded as he was concealing it. She had cousins who were also insurgents. While they were paid for their work, she said, she was herself motivated mainly by revenge. Later it would be revenge for the deaths of her father and four brothers in what she said was a joint American-Iraqi raid on their home, but at first it was more general. She told me she watched the Americans shoot a neighbor in 2005, and she replayed the image over and over in her mind: “I saw him running toward them, and then they shot him in the neck. I still see him. I still remember how he fell when the Americans shot him and I saw him clawing on the ground in the dust before his soul left his body. After that I began to help with making the improvised explosive devices.”
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.
Ranya, like Baida, was from an insurgent family. There was her aunt Wijdan, who police say was a recruiter of women; her father, who the police believed was involved in making bombs for the insurgency; and a brother who was abducted and may also have been involved. A year after Ranya’s father was kidnapped and killed by a Shiite militia, her mother acquiesced to Ranya’s marriage in 2007 to a minor figure in the Islamic State of Iraq.
Less than a year after she was married, Ranya’s husband brought her to a house in Baquba where two women he described as cousins outfitted her with a suicide vest: “They gave me something to eat and something to drink; it had a nice smell,” she recalled. “Then they put the explosive belt on me, those two girls did. I remember there were red wires, but I didn’t know what was inside it. They put it over my head.” Baida later told me that, from her own conversations in jail with Ranya, it was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing and was proud of it.
After Ranya was outfitted with the vest, she told me, a woman in the house, named Um Fatima, took her shopping. They went to one of Baquba’s bazaars and, as Um Fatima looked at pots and pans, Ranya drifted off.
“There was a moment, only a moment, when Ranya felt afraid of death,” Major Hosham said. Ranya told me she just wanted to see her mother. You can imagine that moment: realizing that your life might be about to end and you aren’t ready.
When Um Fatima saw that she had lost Ranya, she fled the market, throwing away the remote detonator she was planning to use if Ranya failed to explode herself, the police said. The police later found the detonator. Meanwhile Ranya, wearing her suicide vest, unsure where she was going, wandered Baquba’s back alleys. As she approached a checkpoint manned by members of the Awakening, the American-backed neighborhood watch formed to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, they ordered her to stop, according to Lt. Kadhim Ahmed al-Tamimi, a detective involved in the case. The Awakening guards thought it suspicious that she was alone and wearing a big abaya. “When they were in doubt about whether she was a suicide bomber they asked a woman on the street to search her, the woman opened the abaya, and when she saw all the wires, she cried out and ran away,” Lieutenant Kadhim said. A few hours later Ranya was in jail along with her mother. Ranya was convicted on Aug. 3 under Iraq’s terrorism law and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
ONE DAY IN March, an interpreter told me that Baida had called several times from the psychiatric hospital and wanted to see us again. I felt we had gained her confidence. Maybe she would open up more. We called and told her we would come the next morning.
The Rashad Psychiatric Hospital lies at the very end of the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City. On that particular day there was a dust storm, and it was hard to see more than a short distance. The sky was a brownishtan color, and we could taste the grit. The hospital, spread over extensive grounds, had been neglected for years: the grass was shoulder high in places, the plantings were scruffy and the wards were almost bare of furnishings. (Much of it had been looted immediately after the American invasion.) Some patients wandered about, talking to themselves. Some wore soiled clothes and looked as if they had not washed in months. As we approached Baida’s ward, a woman, stark naked, came running out screaming; she was pursued by members of the hospital staff as well as by other patients and eventually was covered in a large blanket and brought back inside.
We met Baida in the office of the head nurse for the criminally insane. Baida told us she felt great affection for the head nurse, who was a dwarf, perfectly groomed in a white veil, her face meticulously made up. She would let Baida do anything, including keep her telephone in the hospital, Baida told us.
Baida looked tired and much less ebullient than when I saw her in jail. I could tell she found it difficult to live with people who were so strange. I had brought her a bag of fresh mandarin oranges. She accepted them with a weak smile and only asked: “When will you come back? Tomorrow?” I worried she needed the company of more normal people.
When we returned to the Times bureau, one of our other interpreters took me aside. A military interpreter before he switched to journalism, he was streetwise; a Shiite who lived in a Sunni neighborhood; a survivor. He told me Baida called the bureau many times in the last three weeks wanting to know when I would visit the hospital — a bad sign, he said. Our security adviser agreed. There are no sureties when dealing with insurgents, but one rule is not to tell them exactly when you will be in a particular place. If they know, they can plan an ambush or a kidnapping or detonate an I.E.D. under your car. “Don’t go to see her again,” the interpreter said.
For the next meeting with Baida, our security adviser set a time limit, estimating that as soon as we arrived at the hospital, she might hear we were there and make a phone call to her jihadist friends. Baida called us twice to see “exactly when you are coming.” We lied, keeping it vague. Setting an ambush would be tricky at the hospital but manageable just outside the gate.
When we did finally go, we met with Baida alone, sitting together on a bed in the nurse’s office because there were no chairs. I asked her gently, and as nonjudgmentally as I could, whether she wanted to kill me because I was a foreigner.
“Frankly, yes.” Then she added, to soften it, “Not specifically you, because I know you.”
Would she tell her extremist cousins or her friends about me? Would she give them my description and tell them enough that they could find me?
“I won’t sacrifice my friendship,” she said. A moment later she reversed herself. “But, if they insisted, yes, I would, yes. As a foreigner it is halal to kill you.”
She continued: “If they kill Americans they will do a big huge banquet for dinner.”
She smiled beatifically. As Major Hosham had said, “She is honest.”
“Frankly, they called me when they knew I would meet a journalist and translator and they did their best to get your descriptions and the date you would come,” she went on to say. “They asked me about the date many times. They know the way to the hospital. They would be waiting for you and would kill you. They said to me, ‘If you will do that for us, we will help you escape from the hospital, even from prison.’ They asked for other details: ‘What were your names; what did you look like?’ ”
She seemed excited now at the thought of our capture. “They do not want to kill you, but to torture you and make lunch of your flesh. I could not do anything to help you.”
She described seeing — she didn’t say how — an American soldier the group had kidnapped. “They took out his eyes and burned his body,” she said. “God keep you safe.”
As she described the case, I realized it was one I knew. I covered the trial of three of the men involved in the murder. I asked her what year she saw this; she got it right, 2006. I felt nauseated. Members of what would become the Islamic State of Iraq kidnapped three young soldiers guarding a bridge. One was killed immediately, but the other two were slowly tortured to death. One had his eyes gouged out and his body was tied to the back of a truck and dragged along the roads.
“They showed it to the women because women have a soft heart so they must see it so that they get used to it,” she said.
I looked at my watch; I worried we had stayed too long. I got up hurriedly, knocking my notebooks to the floor. I adjusted my veil, thanked her for her time, for teaching me about jihad and for making me understand how dangerous her world was.
Baida was smiling again. “If I had not seen you before and talked to you, I would kill you with my own hands,” she said pleasantly. “Do not be deceived by my peaceful face. I have a heart of stone.”
A few days later Baida was transferred back to the provincial jail in Baquba after doctors at Rashad hospital determined that she had no psychological disorder. (Baida said the doctors told her early on: “You have a brain like a computer. You shouldn’t be here.”) At this writing she is still in jail. For now, she tells whoever asks that she’s prepared to go out and kill the enemy; but if she were to start saying that she no longer would do that, I imagine she would be released quite quickly. And I have no reason to doubt that she would then carry out her dream of blowing herself up.