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Oil-rich Kirkuk city rocked by attacks 13.1.2007
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KIRKUK,
Kurdistan-Iraq, January 13, -- Iraq's northern oil
hub of Kirkuk has been rocked by attacks as
insurgents shot dead two contractors and blew up a
Shiite mosque under construction.
Gunmen planted explosives in the mosque in the Nida
neighbourhood of eastern Kirkuk and flattened the
building site, Captain Imad Jassim said Saturday.
Seventy-five percent of the mosque had been built
before it was pancaked in the explosion.
In central Kirkuk, gunmen shot dead two contractors
tasked with building access lanes and wounded
another two workers.
The assailants opened fire on the men while they
were working next to the main highway that runs
through Kirkuk from Baghdad before fleeing, Jassim
said.
Another three people were wounded and a house partly
damaged when mortar rounds slammed into Kirkuk's
Nasir neighbourhood, Colonel Anwar Qadir said.
Further south, in the flashpoint city of Samarra, a
Sunni prayer leader and member of the Iraqi Islamic
Party, Yunis Wuhaib, was assassinated outside his
home in the southern Sikak neighbourhood, police
Captain Hashim Ahmed said.
AFP
The former Iraqi president forced about 250,000
Kurdish residents to give up their homes to Arabs in
the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city and the region's
oil industry.
Kirkuk city lies just south border of the Kurdistan
autonomous region and it is not under the full
control of Kurdistan Regional Government
administration.
A referendum is to be held in late 2007 to decide
whether the oil-rich Kurdish province should be
annexed to the safe semiautonomous Kurdistan region
in Iraq's north.
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