Suicide bomb attacks in Iraq have averaged at least one per day since the announcement of a new government in April, according to data gathered by the US military.
Last week saw 23 car bombs, six of which were driven by suicide bombers, detonated throughout the country, according to Brig Gen Donald Alston, the US military's top spokesman in Iraq. He added that six was the lowest number in the past 11 weeks.
Suicide bombers on foot, while also a regular feature, accounted for a lower number of attacks, Gen Alston said. The figures confirm the increased role that suicide attacks appear to be playing in the Iraq conflict, as well as the seeming presence of a near-bottomless pool of recruits for "martyrdom operations", in the terminology of insurgent groups.
US and Iraqi officials have long maintained that virtually all suicide bombers in Iraq have been of foreign origin, infiltrated into the country with the aid of global terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Gen Alston said he was "aware of a handful of suicide bombers . . . established to be Iraqis", although there was "still not a shift in the figures" to indicate a growing trend of Iraqi participation in suicide attacks.
"I no longer would say 100 per cent of them were foreign fighters, but it's still ordinarily that way," he said.
Post-mortem identification of suicide bombers - often mutilated beyond recognition - is notoriously difficult, US officials admit. Most of the foreign fighters are usually assumed to be Sunni Arabs, with ethnic and sectarian links to homegrown Iraqi insurgents.
Gen Alston further contended that serious training for suicide attackers or other insurgents would be practically impossible within the boundaries of Iraq, despite recent US claims of capturing an insurgent training facility north of Baghdad during a joint US-Iraqi offensive in March.
"I'm not aware of any place in Iraq that the insurgents or terrorists can set up shop and conduct training," Gen Alston said, attributing this to "the pressure we keep up on them".
Iraqi residents in the Sunni triangle area north and west of Baghdad,
however, said that they
were aware of training facilities, but only of a crude variety.
Saleh al-Hadithi, a teacher in Haditha, a Sunni Arab town about 170km north-west of Baghdad, said crude training facilities used to exist in houses and orchards. "Insurgents would meet in groups of 25 to 30, and those who had army experience would show the basics to the civilians", he said.
Following recent US-led offensives, however, "we no longer see concentrated groups of insurgents", he added.
Additional reporting by Dhiya Rasan
