A suicide bomber struck outside a bank as elderly men and women waited to cash their pension checks, killing 23 people and wounding nearly 100 in this oil-rich northern city that has become a flashpoint for sectarian tension.
Elsewhere, five Iraqi soldiers were killed and two wounded in a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint in Kan’an, 50km north of Baghdad, and the bodies of 24 men — victims of recent insurgent ambushes in the west of the country -‒ were transported to a hospital in the capital.
Also on Tuesday, an United States soldier and a marine were killed -‒ the soldier when a roadside bomb hit his convoy in southern Baghdad and the marine in combat operations near Fallujah, the military said.
Two other soldiers assigned to a marine unit died in a roadside bombing on Monday in Ramadi, 100km west of the capital.
The violence in Kirkuk was the worst to hit the ethnically mixed city, 290km north of Baghdad, since the war started in March 2003. The largest previous attack was the September 4 suicide car bombing outside an Iraqi police academy in the city that killed 20 people.
A man wearing a belt packed with explosives blew himself up outside the Rafidiyan Bank just after it opened on Tuesday morning, said General Sherko Shakir, Kirkuk’s police chief.
A crowd of street vendors and elderly men and women waiting outside the bank bore the brunt of the blast, and a pregnant woman and several children were among the victims.
Body parts were strewn for 20m in every direction from the blast. The bodies of several victims were found in the rubble of a nearby pedestrian overpass. Two cars were set also on fire.
”It was the biggest awful crime in Kirkuk since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” Shakir said.
Al-Qaeda’s northern affiliate, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for both suicide bombings in northern Iraq and threatened more violence in retaliation for the arrests and killings of Sunni Arabs.
At least 1 705 US military members have died since the war began in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
On Tuesday, marines and Iraqi soldiers killed five Iraqi civilians at an entrance to the volatile western town of Ramadi shortly after a suicide attack on a military checkpoint left one Iraqi soldier dead, the military said.
Insurgents have routinely launched deadly attacks in Kirkuk with the apparent aim of creating ethnic tension among the Kurdish, Sunni, Shi’ite and Turkmen population.
This attack coincided with the swearing-in of veteran Kurdish guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani as the first president of Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region in nearby Irbil, 80km north of Kirkuk.
Kurds have long coveted Kirkuk as the capital of an autonomous Kurdish region encompassing all three of their northern provinces.
Saddam forced nearly 100 000 Kurds out of the city as part of an ”Arabisation” plan.
The Shi’ite political parties that control the government have shied away from the issue of giving Kurds control of the city, saying that the central government would retain future control of its oil riches.
Sarkut Saleh, a street vendor who sells detergent and suffered leg injuries in the blast, said he didn’t understand why civilians were targeted.
”I did not join the Iraqi army or police because I wanted to stay away from death, but I was injured today,” he said. ”I do not know why the terrorists have targeted a crowd of innocent civilians who want to feed their families. This a crime against humanity.”
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, speaking in Parliament after the Kirkuk attack, also accused the insurgents of targeting civilians — as the number of people killed by militants since the April 28 inception of his Shi’ite-dominated government hit at least 1 018 people, including US forces.
”They are trying now to avoid the military areas, the areas controlled by the multinational or Iraqi forces and they are now conducting their operations in the markets,” al-Jaafari said in Parliament shortly before a vote of confidence.
Al-Jaafari’s 37-member government was overwhelmingly approved by a show of hands in the 275-member Parliament. But the government has been criticised for its inability to stop insurgent attacks.
The spree of killings comes as lawmakers wrangle over how big a say Sunni Arab Muslims should have in drawing up the country’s new Constitution. The dispute threatens to further alienate minority Sunnis, who were dominant under Saddam but lost power to long-oppressed Shi’ites and Kurds after the dictator’s ouster.
The Ansar al-Sunnah Army terrorist group, which is based in the north and affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility for the Kirkuk attack in a statement on a website commonly used by Islamic militants.
”One of our brothers from the martyrdom seekers brigade blew up his explosive belt in the middle of this gathering,” the group said, claiming the attack was aimed at off-duty police officers waiting to get paid.
The group accused the Shi’ite-dominated military and security forces of ”arresting, torturing and killing” Sunni Arabs.
”You should know that these Muslims have brothers who vowed themselves to take the revenge,” said the statement, which could not be independently verified.
The group also said in a separate statement that it was responsible for the suicide car bombing against an Iraqi army checkpoint that killed five soldiers and wounding two others in Kan’an.
In Baghdad, the bodies of 24 men — some beheaded — were taken to a hospital, Iraqi officials said. The men had been killed in recent ambushes on convoys in western Iraq, seven on Sunday and 17 last Thursday.
Another suicide car bombing that targeted a joint US-Iraqi checkpoint at an entry point to Ramadi, 112km west of Baghdad, killed an Iraqi soldier.
Five civilians in one of two cars behind the suicide attacker that ignored warning signals to stop also were killed when US and Iraqi forces opened fire, believing they also could be suicide bombers, US military spokesperson Lieutenant Kate Van Den Bossche said.
Security forces also captured a reported key member of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorist group accused of building and selling cars used by suicide bombers, the Iraqi government said.
He was identified as Jassim Hazan Hamadi al-Bazi, also known as Abu Ahmed, and was arrested June 7, the government said. It added that he was part of an al-Qaeda cell run by a man identified as Hussayn Ibrahim.
The announcement claimed al-Bazi also built and sold remote-controlled bombs used in roadside attacks from an electronic repair shop in Balad, 80km north of Baghdad.
He sold the bombs for about $17 each, the government said. ‒ Sapa-AP