Female Suicide Bomber Kills Six in Iraq
"Iraq"09/28/2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A woman suicide bomber attacked an Iraqi army recruitment center Wednesday, killing at least six people and wounding 30 in a northern city where coalition forces had routed insurgents in a major offensive this month.
The attacker, who was wearing men’s clothing, detonated hidden explosives containing metal balls while standing in line with job applicants at the first of three checkpoints outside the center, said Maj. Jamil Mohammed Sadr, the Iraqi army commander based there.
Iraq’s insurgents have rarely, if ever, used women to carry out their attacks - although there was at least one instance of Saddam Hussein’s regime using them during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Days before for the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, two Iraqi women blew up an explosives-laden car in a suicide attack that killed three American soldiers at a U.S. checkpoint near the city of Haditha.
All the six dead and 30 wounded were would-be army recruits in Wednesday’s blast in Tal Afar, about 95 miles east of the Syrian border, Sadr said.
The blast occurred in Tal Afar, 95 miles east of the Syrian border, and it highlighted the difficulty of maintaining security in the towns in the large northwestern region stretching to the border, where insurgents are most active.
Iraqi authorities claimed nearly 200 suspected militants were killed and 315 captured in the Sept. 8-12 offensive in Tal Afar. But U.S. and Iraqi troops discovered afterward that many of the insurgents had slipped out, some of them through a network of underground tunnels.
Most of the forces that participated in the offensive have since withdrawn, though U.S. troops maintain a base and outposts in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad.
“Due to the security vacuum after the withdrawal of (Iraqi) police commandos from Tal Afar, the terrorists came back again,” said Abbas al-Bayati, a parliament member and an ethnic Turkman - a community that ha a large presence in Tal Afar.
The blast was similar to an attack a day earlier, in the town of Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, where a man strapped with explosives blew himself up in a police recruitment center, killing nine Iraqis.
Soon after the Tal Afar offensive, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born, Sunni Arab leader of the al-Qaida in Iraq insurgent group, declared all-out war on Iraq’s majority Shiites.
On Tuesday, Iraqi and U.S. forces announced they had shot and killed Abdullah Abu Azzam, the No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, in a raid on a high-rise apartment building in Baghdad over the weekend. The coalition called Abu Azzam the mastermind of an escalation in suicide bombings that have claimed nearly 700 lives in Baghdad since April, and said he was the financial controller for foreign fighters who entered Iraq to join the insurgency.
Al-Qaida in Iraq issued an Internet statement denying Abu Azzam was the group’s deputy leader, calling him “one of al-Qaida’s many soldiers” and “the leader of one its battalions operating in Baghdad.” The statement confirmed the Baghdad raid but said it was not certain yet whether he was killed.
Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba warned that insurgents would likely carry out revenge attacks for Abu Azzam’s death. He said the militant “was supervising on a daily basis almost all the attacks that happened (in Baghdad) ... He was fully responsible for preparing and sending the car bombs that killed hundreds of innocent Iraqis.”
With the Tal Afar blast, at least 72 people have been killed in attacks since Sunday.
In southern Iraq, police found the badly decomposed bodies of 22 Iraqi men who had been shot to death and dumped in a field, many of them bound and blindfolded, said Police Lt. Othman al-Lami of the Wasit provincial police.
He said the victims appeared to have been killed more than a month ago, and their identities were not immediately known, but the district - northeast of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad - is mostly Shiite.
The U.S. military announced Wednesday that a Marine from the 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force died from a non-hostile gunshot wound two days earlier near Fallujah. The incident is under investigation.
The death brought to 1,919 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.