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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.’ ”