Female Suicide Bomber Kills 2 In Iraqi Province

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
August 13, 2008
Pg. 8


BAGHDAD (AP) — A female suicide bomber attacked an Iraqi convoy north of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing two people and narrowly missing a provincial governor. The bombing was the second suicide attack by a woman in Diyala Province in two days.
The provincial governor, Raad Rashid al-Tamimi, ordered an indefinite curfew in Diyala’s capital, Baquba, where the attack occurred.
The attack took place a day after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced a weeklong suspension of military operations in Diyala to give militants a chance to surrender.
Mr. Tamimi and the commander of Iraqi ground forces, Gen. Ali Ghaidan, were traveling to a meeting of the provincial council in Baquba when the woman detonated her explosives as the vehicles approached, American and Iraqi officials said.
Neither the governor nor the general was injured, they said.
The attack could have been more devastating, but the woman triggered her explosives prematurely — possibly because she feared guards had spotted her, officials said.
The Iraqi police initially said the bomber was a man, but the American military in northern Iraq said American soldiers at the site had confirmed that the attacker was a woman.
On Monday, a woman blew herself up at a checkpoint at a market in Baquba, killing one policeman and wounding 14 other people, including nine police officers.
Also on Tuesday, the United States military announced that a marine was killed Sunday by small-arms fire in Anbar Province. Two other marines were wounded in the attack, the military said.
Diyala, stretching northeast from Baghdad to the Iranian border, has proved to be among the most difficult of Iraq’s 18 provinces to pacify, in part because of its complex mixture of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
The Islamic State of Iraq, a group linked with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown terrorist organization that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners, declared Baquba as its capital after Sunni extremists shifted their operations from Anbar Province after a revolt by Sunni Arab tribes there.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was killed in Diyala by an American airstrike in June 2006.
Mr. Maliki launched a military operation in Diyala last month, hoping to replicate successes against Shiite and Sunni militants in Baghdad, the southern city of Basra and the northern city of Mosul.
 
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