Baghdad, Iraq – A female suicide bomber attacked an Iraqi police recruiting center in the city of Tall Afar on Wednesday, killing at least six people and wounding 20, an Interior Ministry spokesman and The Associated Press reported.
The spokesman said the bomber was wearing an explosives belt when she blew herself up.
The city is a northern insurgent stronghold where U.S. and Iraqi forces conducted a major offensive this month. The spokesman did not have any immediate casualty figures, but The Associated Press reported that at least six people had been killed.
“Today’s attack seems to represent a new tactic by the insurgents to use women, who are rarely searched at Tall Afar’s checkpoints because of religious and social traditions that grant women special treatment,” said Gen. Ahmed Mohammed Khalaf, the regional police chief.
He added that women will now be subject to searches.
In addition to the suicide bombing, the U.S. military said two soldiers were killed in a bomb attack during a patrol near Safwan in southern Iraq.
In other violence, a car bomb exploded in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, killing a civilian and wounding 13 people. Two police officers, a civilian and an Iraqi intelligence employee were killed in separate attacks Wednesday.
The Iraqi police and recruits for Iraq’s forces have been frequent targets of attacks by insurgents.
On Tuesday, a man wearing a belt of explosives under his clothing walked into a crowd of recruits gathered outside a police compound in Baqubah and blew himself up, killing seven and wounding 23 in a spray of burning metal, police officials said.
In Baqubah, a city 30 miles northeast of the capital, Iraqi police officers and soldiers have been under siege by insurgents for months.
The bombing, and the multiple attacks across Iraq on Tuesday, came as American and Iraqi officials offered further details about the killing Sunday of Abu Azzam, whom they called the top lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Azzam was killed in Baghdad in a gun battle with American and Iraqi forces.
Bush called Azzam ‘a brutal killer” and added, “He was one of the terrorists responsible for the recent upsurge in attacks in the Iraqi capital, which is part of their campaign to stop a referendum on the Iraqi constitution and is part of their efforts to break the will of the American people and the will or our coalition.”
As the terrorist group’s Baghdad commander, Azzam was responsible for the recent surge in violent attacks in the city since April, American military officials said. He planned bombings that killed hundreds of Iraqis, said Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
A joint Iraqi and American team tracked Azzam to an apartment in southeastern Baghdad through intelligence sources and corroborating information from a close associate of Azzam’s, military officials said. The plan was to take Azzam alive, the officials said, but he opened fire and was killed in the ensuing gun battle. An insurgent in the apartment was captured, Kubba said.
Azzam, whose real name was Abdullah Najim Abdullah Muhammad al-Juwari, was the terrorist group’s leader in western Anbar province through much of last year, the officials said, and led the largest group of fighters in Fallujah last autumn until the American invasion of that city. He assumed his position as Baghdad commander in the spring of this year.
