It's been two days since Rania Ibrahim, 15, was detained by Iraqi Security Forces when they discovered the explosive packed vest around her chest in the northern city of Baqouba.

At first she told police that she had no idea where the vest came from, the next day she told me her husband's relatives gave it to her but she didn't want to die, she didn't know what the vest was.

Today her story changes yet again. She tells us that her husband told her about the beauty of death, convinced her that paradise awaited her if she killed herself and others for the cause of Al Qaida in Iraq.

Today she may be telling the truth as she sits in a small cell with three other women and once again recounted her tale with new lies and new truths.

"My husband started talking to me about the pain of the grave , about praying , the beautiful women in paradise and the river of honey waiting for those who fight the Americans and explode themselves," she said.

"If I die before you I'll be waiting for you for marriage in paradise," she recalled him saying.

Three days before she donned the explosive vest her husband's female cousins took her measurements and prepared the vest.

"The night before I went out, my husband saw me off with kisses on the forehead and chin, hoping to see me in heaven," she said. 

In her cell with an investigative judge and a police officer she seemed more alert and spoke more freely on Tuesday.

"I still love my husband and he was good with me," she said.

The child bride was forced into marriage at 14-years-old. 

"I discovered that he was fighting the Americans recently. He told me once that they planted a roadside bomb with a friend and waited for a long time for an American patrol, but it was in vain. After that they brought a donkey to detonate so civilians wouldn’t die."

But her husband decided that Rania and he should die for the cause, she said on Tuesday. While her story changed today the fear of a young girl remained. Rania did not want to die, she said.

"I was frightened when they put it on my body," she said referring to her husband's female cousins. "I was worried that it might explode on me...They said I wouldn't feel it."

Once the vest was wrapped around her chest the woman who dressed her, Umm Fatima, told her to go to a school called al Ameen and there she would die.  With fear the teenage girl followed the directions, she said. Before she arrived at her destination she was caught.

Read the original story here. Today's interview was conducted by our Iraqi reporter in Diyala who asked not to be named.

I met Farouk Abd al Sattar al Obeidi last week. He wore a military uniform because in his heart he felt he was a part of the army. He was a deputy to Abu Abd who leads the revolutionists in the Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiyah.

Now al Obeidi is dead, killed by a man who road by on a bicycle and detonated on Sunday. Obeidi along with five of his men and nine civilians were killed.

The men are part of a U.S. backed Sunni militia paid a salary to protect the neighborhood once so violent no one left their homes. They are one of tens of thousands across the country. Many of them are former insurgents who once considered it an honor and a right to fight the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Obeidi was a man who believed in the right to "resist the occupation," he told me a few days before he was killed.  But he said he realized that there were two occupations in Iraq. One by the U.S. and another by Iran, he said. He believed, as many Iraqis do, that Shiite Iran gives money to al Qaida in Iraq, a Sunni extremist groups that consider Shiite unbelievers, to cause unrest in Iraq.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," he said. "We put our hands with the American hands to get rid of these people."

Now the U.S. backed militias are targets of al Qaida in Iraq and al Obeidi believed they were also targeted by Iran.

We talked about life last week and how many members of the Sons of Iraq, as the U.S. has coined them, had been killed for their fight against the Sunni extremist group al Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militias.

"If our leaders are killed our sons will lead on," he said. "We are people who believe in the road of freedom. If it is our lives, we will pay that price."

He paid that price today.

I could see that Al Obeidi was proud of the small office the group rented in a strip mall in Adhamiyah. He sat behind a large desk and pulled out the pictures of the men they had helped catch. He helped pay for the uniforms his men wore, military uniforms although they were not in the army. On the floor green and red lights danced from a light projector attached to the wall to jazz up the drab room.

But he also lamented that the government was sectarian and would not take in the young men who fought for the neighborhood into their forces. They had no respect for the movement, he said. This was a movement that brought down violence in Iraq when U.S. forces and the Iraqi government could not, he said.

"We are an oppressed people," he said. "Our leaders are oppressors."

Personally he had no interest in joining the security forces. He rolled up his pant leg to show me why. He had a scarred pink whole in his leg. It was a reminder of the day he'd survived a grenade attack, he said. He'd helped a Shiite man leave the neighborhood of Adhamiyah after he was threatened by Sunni extremists in the once insurgent-dominated neighborhood. 

He took the man out of Sunni Adhamiyah and returned home, he knew what it was to be displaced. He'd been displaced by Shiite militants.

But someone came to his home to kill him for the crime of moving the Shiite man to safety. They threw a grenade in the house. But before the man with the grenade could run away al Obeidi pulled him to him and the grenade went off. The man was a shield for al Obeidi. The attacker died and al Obeidi lived.

This time he wasn't that lucky.

A female suicide bomber killed at least 19 people according to police. As the pious walked to the southern city of Karbala they were hit with a blast from a woman in the crowd, police said.

Most of the dead were women, police told us. Up to 99 people were wounded. So many families mourn today.

The Foreign Minister to Iraq, Hoshyar Zebari, said that a security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, still in negotiations, would have U.S. troops out of Iraq in three years and bar them from moving outside their bases unilaterally beginning in 2009.

The comments by the foreign minister, first made to the Times of London, confirm what two Iraqi officials told McClatchy Newspapers last week. Zebari said by phone Thursday that the dates would still be based on conditions in Iraq.

If the U.S. has agreed to set a specific date for the end of American operations in Iraqi cities and the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces it marks a major turnaround for the Bush administration, which until last month had refused to discuss a timetable for withdrawal.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and other Iraqi officials were insistent that a date of some sort needed to be set. During Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's visit to Iraq last month, Maliki's national security adviser said that Iraqi officials hoped that U.S. combat troops would be gone by the end of 2010.

Iraqi and American officials had planned to come to a security agreement by the end of July which would replace a United Nations mandate that allows the American-led coaltion forces to occupy Iraq. So far no agreement has been made although both Iraqi and U.S. officials have been saying the deal is close for weeks.

Once negotiations are complete the agreement must still pass the executive council, the political and national security committee and finally the parliament.

Maliki has already voiced concerns over the issue of immunity. Zebari said that Americans and contractors on their bases would come under American law but outside their bases they would be referred to both Iraqi and U.S. military commands.

This is from our visiting reporter Nicholas Spangler of The Miami Herald:

A U.S. soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad was the 14^th to die this month in Iraq, one more than died in the entire month of July, according to the website icasualties.org.

Casualties are still lower than they were in the spring, when improvised explosive devices killed dozens of soldiers every month in Baghdad.

            IED attacks there continue to account for the majority of U.S. troop deaths in hostile incidents, but troops in two major operations in the north of the country are also encountering IED’s on roads and in buildings.

            “We don’t see insurgents mounting a more concerted resistance,” said Major General Mark Hertling, U.S. commander for the region said this week, speaking about an operation in Diyala Province. “We – the U.S. and Iraqi Security Forces – are going to where we haven’t been before, what we term their support areas. “We are finding that those areas have their forms of early-warning devices – that is, IED’s planted on roads to let them know when forces are coming into their zones.”

            At a press conference earlier in the week, Hertling described the northern provinces as “the most volatile area in Iraq right now.”

            Insurgents were pushed into the region, he said, by the U.S. troop surge in Baghdad and the Awakening movement in the western province of Anbar, under which the Pentagon paid Sunni tribesmen to fight al Qaida.   

            As of Thursday, 4,138 American service members had been killed in Iraq. 

Parliament adjourned this month and by Sunday most Iraqi parliament members had flitted off to London or Paris or the province they represent.

A lot of them didn't even wait until parliament ended. Their last controversial session before their summer break was attended by just over half of the legislators.  And those that stuck it out didn't pass the provincial elections law after a bitter dispute over the oil rich city of Kirkuk.

So while most parliament members were unavailable the government chose to open the new parliament building housed outside the heavily fortified Green Zone. The audience was so small at the televised ceremony that the camera zoomed in on one section of the seating to give the illusion of a full crowd.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki attended and gave a twenty minute speech about the new democratic Iraq, the continued intent to find and catch terrorists and how reconstruction was the next step for the new Iraq.

As he spoke people fanned themselves with newspapers and notebooks in the 120 degree heat. A typical scene in the suffocating heat of Iraqi summers.

Finally he gave up.

"I can’t talk for a very long time because it’s very hot," he said. "I hope they put in the air conditioning soon."

After the opening ceremony the parliament sent out a press release to clarify what the celebration signified. The ceremony was to commemorate the basic construction of the building. But it was still not ready for parliament to use as a meeting space.

Small victories. One step at a time.

Driving through Iraq you feel the neglect here. In Basra the city is rivers of sewage, destroyed buildings and bridges from war after war after war.

Every day I pass by the same buildings destroyed years ago during the U.S. led invasion in my neighborhood in Baghdad. Every day they look exactly the same, a pile of rubble. The electricity problem seems to be getting worse; Iraqis have an average of about four hours of electricity a day. While there is talk of reconstruction, a bridge here, flowers planted there the people don't feel a change.

A report from the Government Accountability Office explains a few things. By the end of this year Iraqi will have made $80 billion in oil profits and U.S. tax payers have paid out $48 billion in money for reconstruction. Of Iraq's total expenditures only one percent has been spent "to maintain roads, bridges, vehicles, buildings, water and electricity installations, and weapons for security forces."

Here are a few tidbits of Iraq news today:

Two U.S. soldiers were charged with pre-meditated murder in connection with the death of an Iraqi detainee, a U.S. military statement said.  Other charges include assault, making a false official statement and obstruction of justice.

Staff Sgt. Hal M. Warner and First Lt. Michael C. Behenna of D Company, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry are accused of killing Ali Mansur Mohammed, a detainee who the U.S. military believed had been released in May of this year. After a criminal investigation the soldiers were charged with the slaying of Mohammed.

Also in what seemed to be a swift move, the U.S. military transferred authority to Iraqi Forces following two operations that were deemed successful. It is unclear if that means all U.S. troops will now be withdrawn from the once restive province.

It also may be an indicator of further U.S. troop cuts as pressure for a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq and America increase. So far top U.S. commanders have refused to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The U.S. detainee population has also decreased from 24,000 and growing last year at this time to just under 21,000 detainees. This year 10,000 Iraqis were released. The U.S.-led coalition forces say that under the U.N. mandate they can detain and hold on to Iraqis for as long as they want without trial if they believe they are an imminent threat.

In Hawija, near the oil rich city of Kirkuk, hundreds of Arabs and Turkomen protested Kurdish desires to absorb the province into the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.

The area is at the center of a crisis over the recently passed provincial elections law which stipulated equal distribution of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen in the local council, now dominated by Kurds and their allies. The law was vetoed by the presidential council after the President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, criticized the legislation.

The parliament will meet on Sunday in a special session to resolve the issue. Before Talabani flew off to the Mayo Clinic in the United States he said the issue had been resolved. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

In the southern port city of Basra the followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr went from kingmakers to lepers in weeks.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki descended upon the Shiite militant stronghold and most of the Mahdi Army, the militia attached to Sadr's movement, fled or were detained. Other Shiite militias were also attacked. The Sadrists, a political and social movement, were ousted from their office and the outdoor prayer area was taken away.

Since the battle in March they've been afraid to pray publicly. In one instance when they gathered to pray in a new location security forces broke up the crowd by shooting into the air when the cleric that lead the prayer spoke against the government.

But this Friday they'd struck a deal with the local government and were back in the vast space where they once prayed. About 5,000 men gathered to pray together and a Sadr spokesman praised government officials for being "honorable." This is not a typical statement from the now opposition movement to a government dominated by rival Shiite parties. But it is unclear how much his large following has dwindled.

Sadr's statement over the past year and a half have been more and more peaceful calling for his militia to stand down and eventually disband, save an elite fighting force that would resist the Americans.

Most recently he offered the government his support if they refused to sign a security agreement with the United States that is still in negotiations.

Some say Sadr has smartened up and realized he has to wait the Americans out and then take on his Shiite rivals. Others believe he is significantly weakened by recent operations in his strongholds of Basra, Amara and the vast Shiite slum in Sadr City. There have been Shiites who have turned on the militia, happy to be rid of a group that in some cases went from a protector to violent intimidator.

He no longer holds the ground in the heartland of poor Shiites. The question is does he hold their hearts?