A suicide bomber walks into a crowd of pilgrims going to the city of Karbala, which Iraq’s Shiites consider holy, then blows himself up among the crowd by pressing the detonation button on his explosives belt while shouting “Allahu Akbar” [God is the greatest]. The loud explosion shreds the victims’ bodies.

Because of strong security measures, the suicide bomber has become an alternative to the car bomb. He can easily infiltrate a crowd and is hard to detect.

Police Capt. Imad al-Khafaji, who heads a police station south of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber killed dozens of pilgrims on Dec. 19, told Al-Monitor, “The biggest challenge facing the religious processions at various occasions is the suicide bomber,” pointing to the difficulty of “identifying the perpetrator and the details of the suicide operations, except through the accounts of the survivors, most of whom would be in a state of terror due to the explosion.”

Khafaji admits that “having tight security measures without modern detection technologies cannot stop the attackers. … The bomber managed to quietly sneak into the center of the crowd by using side passages and by sneaking between the dozens of soldiers deployed around where the blast took place. … Those who were nearby give different accounts of what happened. But the heart of the matter is the shredding of the suicide bomber’s body after detonating an explosive belt that killed dozens around him.”