Female suicide bomber kills six at Iraqi army recruitment center

Today it seems that the resistance to the US/UK occupation of Iraq is making a major turn. We had our first female suicide bomber in the country in Baghdad. Al-Qaeda is loving it. Is Iraq becoming more like Palestine? Does this mean the occupation is creating a larger culture of terrorism? If the answers to these questions are yes then it is time pullout before things get even worse.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – A woman strapped with explosives and disguised as a man blew herself up outside an Iraqi army recruiting center in a northern town Wednesday, killing at least six people and wounding 30 in the first known attack by a female suicide bomber in the country’s bloody insurgency.

Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the blast, saying in an Internet posting that it was carried out by “a blessed sister.”

The attack in Tal Afar, where U.S. and Iraqi forces routed militants in a major offensive two weeks ago, demonstrated the difficulty of maintaining security in the towns in the large northwestern region stretching to the Syrian border, where insurgents are most active.

The woman, disguised as a man in a white dishdasha – a traditional male robe – and a kaffiyeh head scarf, slipped into a line of applicants to join the Iraqi army at the first of three checkpoints outside the center when she detonated explosives hidden under her clothes and packed with metal balls, said Maj. Jamil Mohammed Sadr in Tal Afar.

It was the first known instance that a woman has carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq. In October 2003, a female bomber was caught trying…

Posted by atrain
Ari Paul has written for The American Prospect, In These Times, Tikkun, Z, Punk Planet, openDemocracy.net, Reason and other newspapers and magazines. He is also a reporter for The Chief-Leader, a New York weekly covering labor in the city.