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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.