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FEMALE BOMBERS: Burqa clad would-be suicide women attackers talk with media representatives following their arrest by security forces in Madyan, a town in restive Swat valley, on Jan 9. Militant groups, particularly al-Qaeda, are using more women soldiers as suicide bombers and the number of female bombings is rising and is likely to continue to increase. (Rashid Iqbal/AFP/Getty Images)
The pilgrims had been walking for a week already.
Some had traveled as far as 264 miles on foot from the southern port city of Basra, and were close to their destination of Karbala, the shrine city.
Tired and weary, they had stopped at one of the many roadside hospitality tents, named "mawkeb" (or caravan), in the town of Bab al Shams.
The patron of the mawkeb had offered them food and water, and a brief respite on their annual pilgrimage that they share with up to 10 million other Shia Muslims.
Their goal was to reach the shrine of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammed, before the festival of Arba'een, on Feb. 5.
However, as they were eating dates and contemplating the journey ahead, the unthinkable happened.
A pillar of flame burst out from under the abaya of a woman who had been standing inside the tent. The sound of the explosion was replaced by a low wail of the injured survivors of the attack.
"I saw the bodies of women and children, and bags and slippers strewn all around in pools of blood," said taxi driver Ahmad Najem, 30, a witness to the suicide bombing last Monday who spoke to international media.
Fifty-four pilgrims lay dead as a result of the attack.
The identity of the woman who carried out the suicide bombing and her motives for doing so, were lost in the ruins of the mawkeb.
Her biggest strength, was that no one suspected her, as a woman, to carry out an atrocity on that scale. Indeed, among the dead were five women employed to search female pilgrims for bombs.
Ex-White House adviser Richard Clarke, said that intelligence reports suggest that al-Qaeda has trained female mujahedeen, jihad warriors, to sabotage planes.
"They have trained women," he said at the end of January. "There are others who are still out there who have been trained and who are clean skins—that means people who we do not have a record of.
"These people may not look like al-Qaeda, may not be Arabs and may not be men."
