A suicide bomber killed 12 people and wounded around 150 in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Monday in the latest attack by insurgents using explosives-laden trucks.
Insurgents have hit a string of northern towns in the past 10 days in bombings that have killed hundreds of people.
Many of the victims of Monday’s attack were women and children at a nearby school, police said.
The United States military, thinly stretched by the war and facing proposed funding cuts by the Democratic-controlled Congress, said on Monday that thousands of troops would have to return to Iraq sooner than their promised year at home to maintain President George Bush’s new Baghdad security plan.
Officials, who blame the recent attacks on Sunni Islamist militants from al-Qaeda, say insurgents have shifted the focus of attacks to outside Baghdad due to the nearly seven-week-old crackdown in the capital.
In other violence, the bodies of 19 men from a Shi’ite village kidnapped by gunmen at a fake checkpoint north of Baghdad were found on Monday, police said. All had been shot in the head in one of the biggest kidnappings in months.
The joint offensive by US and Iraqi forces is seen as a final attempt to halt Iraq’s plunge into sectarian civil war.
The Pentagon said its decision to deploy 9 000 troops would allow commanders to maintain the crackdown, but about half of them will have to return to combat before their year at home is up. The units will largely replace US forces already in Iraq, which number around 145 000.
Opinion polls show the majority of Americans oppose Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, where 3 253 U.S. soldiers, 136 British troops and at least 60 000 Iraqis have been killed.
British soldier killed
One British soldier was killed and another wounded when their patrol was shot at in Basra in southern Iraq, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said.
Police said the suicide bomber in Kirkuk rammed his truck into the main gate of the police criminal investigation department. The blast echoed across the ethnically mixed city and left the building partially destroyed.
”I was preparing lunch for my children when the explosion happened. I thought the house was going to collapse,” said one woman, holding her screaming daughter and son near the scene.
Police and hospital officials put the death toll at 12.
A Reuters reporter at the scene saw a fireman holding the bloodied body of a young child. It was not clear whether the child was dead or alive.
Last Tuesday, a truck bomb in the northern town of Tal Afar killed 152 people in the deadliest single insurgent attack of the four-year-old war.
In the mass kidnapping, gunmen seized the 19 men from a Shi’ite village near the city of Baquba after stopping cars at a fake checkpoint on Sunday. The bodies were found not far from Baquba, about 65km north of Baghdad.
Car bombs also killed four people and wounded 14 in Baghdad, police officers said. A suicide bomber killed three people near a popular restaurant in the town of Khalis, north of Baghdad.
Sunni Arab officials vowed to step up their battle with al-Qaeda-linked militants in Iraq’s Sunni provinces, where a violent power struggle has begun to spill over into Baghdad.
Iraqi and US officials have encouraged tribesmen to band together against al-Qaeda in Anbar province, the deadliest region in Iraq for US forces.
”Facing them is inevitable,” said a senior member in the Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni Arab bloc in Parliament.
”It’s a difficult decision and violence will increase because they will fight back, but we have to do it.”
War funding
The Democratic-led US Congress is ratcheting up pressure on Bush to withdraw US troops from Iraq, defying his veto threat and passing measures that tie $100-billion in war funding to a pull-out deadline in 2008.
Without those funds, the Pentagon will run out of money for the conflict in the coming months, although exactly when this would happen is in dispute.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went further by proposing legislation to end all funding for the war by March 31 2008, with some exceptions.
”As more and more Americans demand to see the troops get out of what is clearly a civil war, this administration stubbornly continues to stick its head in the sand,” Reid’s spokesperson Jim Manley said in a statement.
It remains uncertain how much support Reid’s proposal can win in the closely divided Senate.
Bush has vowed to veto any funding bill that includes a withdrawal commitment. His Republican allies have equated the Democratic proposals to announcing a surrender date to al-Qaeda and say they have enough numbers to sustain Bush’s veto. – Reuters 2007