How Baida Wanted to Die
Aliss Rubin, NYT, 12 Aug 2009
Pg 3 of 3
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 brownish*tan 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/ma...pagewanted=all