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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 handi¬work 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.