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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.
BOMB DETECTOR Major Hosham with a captured knife. He said: “I like Baida. She is — honest.”
RANYA’S STORY “I remember there were red wires, but I didn’t know what was inside it.”
“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.