Making Bombers in Iraq

RASHIDIYA, Iraq (news - web sites) — Namir Awaad was a suicide bomber made in Iraq.


There is no evidence that he belonged to Al Qaeda or trained in a terrorist camp. He spent 23 apparently uneventful years on the planet until the chilly morning of Dec. 9.


That's when the slender, bearded loner strode up to a Bradley fighting vehicle guarding a U.S. Army base here and detonated a backpack bomb, blowing himself apart and injuring a soldier.


Because a quirk of physics left his face intact, Awaad became one of the few suicide bombers in Iraq to be definitively identified. The case helped expose a home-grown network suspected in a string of suicide bombings that have killed more than 25 people in this volatile zone northeast of Baghdad. Authorities have detained several Iraqis suspected of being accomplices and believe that three car bombers were Iraqis.

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