English Audio Request

Baida looked tired and much less ebullient than when I saw her in jail. I could tell she found it difficult to live with people who were so strange. I had brought her a bag of fresh mandarin oranges. She accepted them with a weak smile and only asked: “When will you come back? Tomorrow?” I worried she needed the company of more normal people.
When we returned to the Times bureau, one of our other interpreters took me aside. A military interpreter before he switched to journalism, he was streetwise; a Shiite who lived in a Sunni neighborhood; a survivor. He told me Baida called the bureau many times in the last three weeks wanting to know when I would visit the hospital — a bad sign, he said. Our security adviser agreed. There are no sureties when dealing with insurgents, but one rule is not to tell them exactly when you will be in a particular place. If they know, they can plan an ambush or a kidnapping or detonate an I.E.D. under your car. “Don’t go to see her again,” the interpreter said.
For the next meeting with Baida, our security adviser set a time limit, estimating that as soon as we arrived at the hospital, she might hear we were there and make a phone call to her jihadist friends. Baida called us twice to see “exactly when you are coming.” We lied, keeping it vague. Setting an ambush would be tricky at the hospital but manageable just outside the gate.
When we did finally go, we met with Baida alone, sitting together on a bed in the nurse’s office because there were no chairs. I asked her gently, and as nonjudgmentally as I could, whether she wanted to kill me because I was a foreigner.
“Frankly, yes.” Then she added, to soften it, “Not specifically you, because I know you.”
Would she tell her extremist cousins or her friends about me? Would she give them my description and tell them enough that they could find me?
“I won’t sacrifice my friendship,” she said. A moment later she reversed herself. “But, if they insisted, yes, I would, yes. As a foreigner it is halal to kill you.”
She continued: “If they kill Americans they will do a big huge banquet for dinner.”
She smiled beatifically. As Major Hosham had said, “She is honest.”