More female bombers

Video footage of a woman blowing herself up in a crowded marketplace

In a related story to the last article, Suicide bombings by women in Iraq are on the rise.

According to Admiral Patrick Driscoll, a spokesman from Multi National Force I Iraq, said there were 18 female suicide bombers in Iraq so far this year, as opposed to only 8 for all of 2007.

There seem to be several converging factors over the increase in female bombers in Iraq:

1) Increasing desperation by Al Qaeda, which is running short on suicide-bound recruits (not surprising, considering they usually don't come back)

2) Coalition and Iraqi forces are reluctant to search women, and the abayas (black flowing robes) that women wear are very good for hiding suicide vests.

3) Many decades of war, (even before the current war) means that Iraq has a shortage of men overall, since so many have either been killed or sent to prison - leaving plenty of women alone without means of support.

Of course, it's not only limited to Iraq. Israel has seen a similar trend in the past, as well as just about every other nation in the Middle East. Expect this trend to increase in the future. Expect it to spread even farther. And expect that nations such as the UK, which don't require vieled Muslim women to have photographs on their ID cards, are going to regret that decision one day.