Female Bomber Wounds 7 GIs In Iraq

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Post
November 29, 2007
Pg. 20
Refugees Continue Returning to Capital
By Associated Press
BAGHDAD, Nov. 28 -- A woman wearing an explosives belt blew herself up near a U.S. patrol about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, wounding seven U.S. troops and five Iraqis, the U.S. military said Wednesday. The attack Tuesday near Baqubah, in Diyala province, was a rare example of a female suicide bombing.
Meanwhile Wednesday, more Iraqi refugees, heartened by reports of the lull in violence in the capital, were beginning to return, and a convoy carrying hundreds of people arrived in Baghdad after an overnight bus ride from Damascus, Syria.
A government spokesman said that 60,000 Iraqis had returned in the past month and that officials were expecting a similar number in coming weeks. "The Iraqi government will do its best to protect these families," the spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said at a news conference Wednesday.
Also Wednesday, Iraqi lawmakers briefly boycotted the start of a legislative session, demanding that U.S. forces ease checkpoint searches for entry to the fortified Green Zone, where the parliament building is located.
Firyad Rwandzi, spokesman for the Kurdish bloc, said the boycott came in response to "the insulting behavior of the American soldiers toward parliament members" as they tried to reach the building.
The U.S. military says attacks across Iraq have fallen to their lowest level since February 2006, attributing this partly to a buildup of about 30,000 troops earlier this year. Sectarian violence rose sharply after an attack on a Shiite shrine in February 2006.
In Hawijah, in northern Iraq, nearly 6,000 Sunni Arabs joined a security pact with U.S. forces in what U.S. officers described as a critical step in plugging the remaining escape routes for extremists flushed from former strongholds.
The new alliance -- called the single largest volunteer mobilization since the war began -- covers the last gateway for groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq seeking new havens in the north, military officials said.
 
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