BAGHDAD: A woman wearing a suicide vest blew herself up near a popular market and a Shia mosque in restive Diyala province north of the capital Wednesday, killing eight civilians and wounding seven others, police said.
The attack took place in Khan Bani Saad, a town 15 km south of Baqouba, Diyala’s provincial capital. Police spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information to the media.
Involving women in fighting violates religious taboos in Iraq, and an increasing number of female suicide attacks could indicate insurgents are growing increasingly desperate. US-led forces are increasingly catching insurgents suspected of training women to become human bombs or finding evidence of efforts by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to recruit women, according to military records.
Because of Muslim cultural sensitivities, women can be excellent candidates for suicide attacks when there are no female security guards. Most Iraqis are conservative Muslims who believe physical contact is forbidden between women and men not related by blood or marriage. As a result, women are often allowed to pass through male-guarded checkpoints without being searched. In October, the US Army trained 20 women to work as security guards in a Baghdad suburb after a female suicide bomber entered a nearby building without being searched.
Wednesday’s bombing was the fourth female suicide attack in Iraq in three months, and all have taken place in Diyala province.
The province has defied the trend toward lower violence over the past six months in Baghdad and much of central Iraq. Insurgents who were pushed out of the western province of Anbar and out of Baghdad have shifted their operations into the farming region of palm and citrus groves, where Shia and Sunni communities press up next to each other as if on a checkerboard.
Diyala has been a major focus of a nationwide campaign the US military launched last week against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other extremists. Six US soldiers were killed and four were wounded as they searched a booby-trapped house in Diyala just days into the military operation.
At least 273 civilians were slain in Diyala last month, compared to at least 213 in June, according to an Associated Press count. Over the same span, monthly civilian deaths in Baghdad dropped from at least 838 to at least 182.
But after several months of relative quiet in Baghdad, fighters believed allied with Iran have resumed mortar and rocket attacks, with several big blasts heard shortly after dawn on Wednesday as well as a few more later in the morning.
On Tuesday night, at least five mortars crashed into the fortified Green Zone, site of the American Embassy and Iraqi government, not long after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference after making an unannounced visit.
Mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone, which had been a daily event, virtually stopped about mid-October. The quiet followed a six-month cease-fire announced by radical Shia leader Muqtada Al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia in August, though some breakaway factions of Al-Sadr s group continued to launch attacks.
The resumption of the attacks coincided with a sharp rise in US rhetoric against Iran by President Bush during his tour of the Middle East.
Two Mahdi Army commanders have told The Associated Press the uptick in mortar and rocket attacks is not the work of their organization, which continues its cease-fire.
Instead, they said the attacks are the work of a new organization with ties to Iran. The group, called Italat, which means intelligence in Farsi, was formerly the Iranian Revolutionary Guard s liaison to the Mahdi Army and its rogue factions, the commanders said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to advertise their jobs to the US military.
Not all the attacks in Baghdad may be linked to Shia extremists. About 10 a.m., two mortar rounds slammed into Palestine Street in east Baghdad.Three pedestrians were wounded, police said. The target was unclear, but the neighborhood is dominated by Shias.
But other types of attacks linked to Iran also appear to be on the rise.
On Sunday, Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, told reporters that the overall flow of weaponry from Iran into Iraq appears to be down, but that attacks with explosively formed projectiles tied to Tehran are up by a factor of two or three in recent days. Frankly, we are trying to determine why that might be, he said.
The roadside bombs, known as EFPs, are armor-piercing explosives that have killed hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq. US military officials have said for months that mainly Shia Iran has been supplying the devices to Shia militias in Iraq. Tehran denies it.
In other attacks Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded at 8 a.m. in the commercial Bab Al-Muadham district of Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding four. The blast appeared to target a passing police car but instead hit a civilian car, a police officer said.
About the same time, another roadside bomb went off southeast of Baghdad at an intersection where US and Iraqi troops often pass, police said. The attack killed one civilian and wounded four others.
In northern Iraq, police said a suicide bomber blew up his car in an attack against a US convoy in the Al-Maliya district east of the city of Mosul. The US military said it was investigating the report.
