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Until 2007, it was too dangerous for the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police to enter the area. When they finally did, they found a strange community. “When we entered Makhisa we didn’t find a TV because it’s forbidden,” Col. Khalid Mohammed al-Ameri, who was in the army under Saddam Hussein and has served all over the country, told me. “And no ice, no cigarettes and no tomatoes and cucumbers mixed together at the same shop.”
The strictest Sunni extremists believe that people should not have anything that did not exist in the early days of Islam. Since there was no electricity in the seventh century, there could be neither refrigeration nor ice and no television. The aversion to mixing tomatoes and cucumbers is because cucumbers are viewed as a male vegetable and tomatoes are female, and mixing them in a box is seen as lascivious, Colonel Khalid said, shaking his head.
Ranya, like Baida, was from an insurgent family. There was her aunt Wijdan, who police say was a recruiter of women; her father, who the police believed was involved in making bombs for the insurgency; and a brother who was abducted and may also have been involved. A year after Ranya’s father was kidnapped and killed by a Shiite militia, her mother acquiesced to Ranya’s marriage in 2007 to a minor figure in the Islamic State of Iraq.
Less than a year after she was married, Ranya’s husband brought her to a house in Baquba where two women he described as cousins outfitted her with a suicide vest: “They gave me something to eat and something to drink; it had a nice smell,” she recalled. “Then they put the explosive belt on me, those two girls did. I remember there were red wires, but I didn’t know what was inside it. They put it over my head.” Baida later told me that, from her own conversations in jail with Ranya, it was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing and was proud of it.
After Ranya was outfitted with the vest, she told me, a woman in the house, named Um Fatima, took her shopping. They went to one of Baquba’s bazaars and, as Um Fatima looked at pots and pans, Ranya drifted off.