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“There was a moment, only a moment, when Ranya felt afraid of death,” Major Hosham said. Ranya told me she just wanted to see her mother. You can imagine that moment: realizing that your life might be about to end and you aren’t ready.
When Um Fatima saw that she had lost Ranya, she fled the market, throwing away the remote detonator she was planning to use if Ranya failed to explode herself, the police said. The police later found the detonator. Meanwhile Ranya, wearing her suicide vest, unsure where she was going, wandered Baquba’s back alleys. As she approached a checkpoint manned by members of the Awakening, the American-backed neighborhood watch formed to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, they ordered her to stop, according to Lt. Kadhim Ahmed al-Tamimi, a detective involved in the case. The Awakening guards thought it suspicious that she was alone and wearing a big abaya. “When they were in doubt about whether she was a suicide bomber they asked a woman on the street to search her, the woman opened the abaya, and when she saw all the wires, she cried out and ran away,” Lieutenant Kadhim said. A few hours later Ranya was in jail along with her mother. Ranya was convicted on Aug. 3 under Iraq’s terrorism law and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
ONE DAY IN March, an interpreter told me that Baida had called several times from the psychiatric hospital and wanted to see us again. I felt we had gained her confidence. Maybe she would open up more. We called and told her we would come the next morning.
The Rashad Psychiatric Hospital lies at the very end of the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City. On that particular day there was a dust storm, and it was hard to see more than a short distance. The sky was a brownish¬tan color, and we could taste the grit. The hospital, spread over extensive grounds, had been neglected for years: the grass was shoulder high in places, the plantings were scruffy and the wards were almost bare of furnishings. (Much of it had been looted immediately after the American invasion.) Some patients wandered about, talking to themselves. Some wore soiled clothes and looked as if they had not washed in months. As we approached Baida’s ward, a woman, stark naked, came running out screaming; she was pursued by members of the hospital staff as well as by other patients and eventually was covered in a large blanket and brought back inside.
We met Baida in the office of the head nurse for the criminally insane. Baida told us she felt great affection for the head nurse, who was a dwarf, perfectly groomed in a white veil, her face meticulously made up. She would let Baida do anything, including keep her telephone in the hospital, Baida told us.