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Female suicide bomber attacks Iraqi volunteers

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Times Staff Writer

A female bomber blew herself up Friday in front of a building used by former Sunni Arab insurgents now allied with U.S. forces, one of three attacks that killed at least 24 people in Diyala province during the day.

It was the latest in a string of bombings that have targeted groups dubbed “concerned local citizens,” or CLCs, which aid U.S. efforts to combat the insurgency.

The military has been working with about 60,000 volunteers, including some former insurgents, to help police their areas in central and northern Iraq. They are credited with helping to drive Sunni militants from Anbar province and parts of Baghdad, where attacks have declined since about 28,500 additional U.S. forces arrived in the country this year. But violence has flared in regions north of the capital, where many of the militants are believed to have fled.

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Women rarely carry out suicide missions in Iraq, but the attack Friday was the second such bombing in Diyala in less than two weeks. On Nov. 27, a woman detonated her explosives near a U.S. patrol, wounding seven troops and five Iraqi civilians near the provincial capital, Baqubah.

Friday’s female bomber struck about 9.30 a.m. on a busy street in Muqdadiya, a volatile ethnically and religiously mixed city about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. Police said 16 people were killed and 27 injured, but the U.S. military put the figure at 12 dead and 17 wounded.

The woman targeted a safe house used by members of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an insurgent group that once fought alongside the Sunni militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq under the banner of Islamic State of Iraq.

The decision of many of the groups’ members to switch sides was a key factor in the success this year of a series of U.S. offensives to clear Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgents from Baqubah. But the militants, who had declared the city to be the capital of their Islamic caliphate, remain entrenched in the palm groves in the Diyala River valley, where much of the fighting is taking place.

A witness said the woman approached the volunteers, who have formed a citizens group to help secure Muqdadiya, claiming to have a question. The volunteers gather at the building on Fridays, the Muslim holy day. As people approached the woman to help her, she detonated explosives strapped to her waist, said the witness, Ammar Fadhil.

“At first, we didn’t understand what had happened,” he said. “But later, we saw corpses, dismembered bodies and some body parts.”

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An Iraqi security official identified the bomber as Suhailah Hussein Chlayeb, a woman believed to be in her late 40s or early 50s who had three sons who were killed by the Iraqi army. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to address the media.

Elsewhere in Diyala, an Iraqi army convoy was ambushed north of Muqdadiya by men firing AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. Six soldiers and five volunteers were killed, said U.S. Army Maj. Peggy Kageleiry, a military spokeswoman. Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded and an unspecified number of assailants were detained.

Less than 20 miles away, an Iraqi policeman was killed and four were wounded in a roadside bombing northwest of Mansouriya, Kageleiry said. But Iraqi security forces said a suicide bomber drove his car into a checkpoint, killing at least seven Iraqi soldiers and three volunteers. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the two accounts.

In other violence around Iraq, gunmen ambushed and killed a Sunni tribal leader, along with his four guards, who had been working with the U.S. in the northern village of Rabia near the Syrian border, police said.

Also in the north, oil gushed into the Tigris River after an explosion damaged a pipeline supplying crude from the city of Kirkuk to the refinery in Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad. A dark cloud hung over the spot where the pipeline ruptured and the oil was burning, said an official with the Facilities Protection Service in Kirkuk, which secures government installations. Officials suspended the flow of crude from Kirkuk to the refinery until the damage is repaired.

Also in Kirkuk, one person was killed and another injured in a drive-by shooting, police said. A farmer also was gunned down in a nearby village.

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In Baghdad, police recovered three bodies, apparent victims of sectarian killings. The toll was far lower than the 30 or more bodies that were recovered daily before the U.S. troop buildup began early this year.

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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Times staff writer Raheem Salman in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Tikrit contributed to this report.

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