Iraq is seeing a lot more gun-toting women around these days.

The Iraqi police academy north of Baghdad is training women as a way to counter the latest deadly tactic of Al Qaeda in Iraq – female suicide and homicide bombers.

"I felt like the practice was real — like I was part of the war — and I was protecting my country from terrorists," Wafaa Najah Abdalla said after she fired 160 rounds from a Kalashnikov rifle at a target, told The Associated Press.

Not only are women training at this academy in the volatile Diyala province, but for one month, the women stay and train at the academy with 680 male colleagues. That means they’re learning the same lessons as men on how to tame riots, disassemble guns and set up checkpoints. They will become full-time policewomen after they graduate next week.

Although some are resisting the use of women in the police force — either because the job is too dangerous or because they believe the woman shouldn’t leave her family for the academy — the need for them is overruling that opposition. U.S. military officials say the number of attacks by female bombers in Iraq has tripled from eight in 2007 to more than two dozen so far this year.

Women homicide bombers know they will not be searched by males, or have their robes lifted. Female officers, on the other hand, will have no societal taboos preventing them from searching women.

The police recruits — a mix of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds — are told to put sectarian perspectives and politics aside and put their country first. Some are widows whose husbands were killed by militants, while others have disabled husbands and relatives who can’t work after being wounded in violence. But in a country where economic success can only come after security is achieved, everyone needs the paychecks.

"I must support my daughter, because I don’t have anyone to take care of us," said Abdalla, whose husband was kidnapped in 2006 in Diyala and, as she was later told, he was killed. "But I want to also prove that we have the right, as women in the society, to work as policewomen."