Female suicide bomber attacks Iraqi volunteers
BAGHDAD — A female bomber blew herself up Friday in front of a building used by former Sunni Arab insurgents now allied with U.S. forces, one of three attacks that killed at least 24 people in Diyala province during the day.
It was the latest in a string of bombings that have targeted groups dubbed "concerned local citizens," or CLCs, which aid U.S. efforts to combat the insurgency.
The military has been working with about 60,000 volunteers, including some former insurgents, to help police their areas in central and northern Iraq. They are credited with helping to drive Sunni militants from Anbar province and parts of Baghdad, where attacks have declined since about 28,500 additional U.S. forces arrived in the country this year. But violence has flared in regions north of the capital, where many of the militants are believed to have fled.
Women rarely carry out suicide missions in Iraq, but the attack Friday was the second such bombing in Diyala in less than two weeks. On Nov. 27, a woman detonated her explosives near a U.S. patrol, wounding seven troops and five Iraqi civilians near the provincial capital, Baqubah.
Friday's female bomber struck about 9.30 a.m. on a busy street in Muqdadiya, a volatile ethnically and religiously mixed city about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. Police said 16 people were killed and 27 injured, but the U.S. military put the figure at 12 dead and 17 wounded.
The woman targeted a safe house used by members of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an insurgent group that once fought alongside the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq under the banner of Islamic State of Iraq.
The decision of many of the groups' members to switch sides was a key factor in the success this year of a series of U.S. offensives to clear Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgents from Baqubah. But the militants, who had declared the city to be the capital of their Islamic caliphate, remain entrenched in the palm groves in the Diyala River valley, where much of the fighting is taking place.
A witness said the woman approached the volunteers, who have formed a citizens group to help secure Muqdadiya, claiming to have a question. The volunteers gather at the building on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. As people approached the woman to help her, she detonated explosives strapped to her waist, said the witness, Ammar Fadhil.
"At first, we didn't understand what had happened," he said. "But later, we saw corpses, dismembered bodies and some body parts."
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