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“As soon as I get out I will explode myself against the invaders,” she told me.
A few moments before we left, I asked when it would be convenient to come see her again. She said she was being moved soon to a psychiatric hospital in Baghdad, and she was afraid. I promised her we would visit her there and asked how we could get in touch. It turned out that she had smuggled a cellphone into the jail — or perhaps appealed to some guard not to take it from her. She never left the sim card in the phone; it was hidden in her underwear, she said. One time, the phone itself was discovered — she had hidden it in a ceiling-light fixture — and confiscated, but she still had the sim card and had somehow got access to another phone.
“They don’t know,” she said softly, nodding at the policemen in the room, who were staring at a music video. I felt a wave of unease. She was not a beginner.
THE ROAD TO the Abu Sayda district in Diyala should cross a giant highway bridge, but it was bombed more than a year ago and has yet to be repaired. Cars snake single file into a deep gully, travel parallel to a line of towering girders and eventually crawl up the other side of the ravine. The district lies near a bend in the Diyala River, and many of the farms and villages are cut off on three sides by water, making it a haven for insurgents.
One of the district’s villages is Makhisa, which was home to at least three women who became suicide bombers. A settlement on the edge of Makhisa was for many years the home of Baida’s cellmate, Ranya Ibrahim. It had the dubious distinction of being the town favored by the notorious Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Police told me that he married a woman from Makhisa and sometimes stayed in the village until he was killed on June 7, 2006.
The town, set among thick date-palm and pomegranate orchards, consists of little more than a few streets lined with low slung, mostly rickety houses, many with simple palm-thatch porches. On the outskirts, one in every four vehicles is a wooden horse-drawn wagon. The animals pull canisters filled with gas used for cooking, transport wood and serve as an informal bus service for local women and children. The most recent suicide bombing near here occurred this spring. It killed at least 47 people, many of them Iranian Shiite pilgrims.