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Kirkuk: Truck bomber crashed into a police
station in a Kurdish neighborhood
3.4.2007 |
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Truck
bomber levels Iraqi police station in Kirkuk,
killing 15 and wounding nearly 200
April 3, 2007
Kirkuk, (Iraq border with Kurdistan region), --
A suicide truck bomber, his deadly payload hidden
under bags of flour, crashed into a police station
in a Kurdish neighborhood in the disputed city of
Kirkuk on Monday. At least 15 people were killed,
including a newborn girl and a U.S.
soldier, and nearly 200 were wounded.
Several girls walking home from school were among
those wounded in the bombing, a possible prelude to
far greater violence to this oil-rich city 180 miles
north of the capital. The attack came just days
after the government adopted a plan to relocate
thousands of Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk decades
ago in Saddam Hussein's campaign to displace the
Kurds.
Doctors worked in a scene of bloody pandemonium as
wounded were brought to the emergency room. There
was barely room to move. Many of those being treated
appeared to be either very young children or
schoolgirls, many crying with blood spattered on
their clothes. Several badly mutilated dead bodies
filled the back of a police pickup truck as a U.S.
helicopter
flew overhead.
The government plan to move Arabs – both Shiite and
Sunni Muslims – out of Kirkuk was a victory for the
Kurds, who have 58 seats in the 275-member Iraqi
parliament and are closely aligned with the ruling
Shiites. Thousands of Kurds have returned to Kirkuk
after being forced out by Saddam, who accused them
of siding with Iran in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war
in the 1980s.
But many Arab politicians have rejected the plan,
saying it would facilitate attempts by non-Arab
Kurds to absorb the city and its surrounding oil
riches into the ethnic group's semiautonomous region
in the northeast of Iraq. The strongest opposition
has come from Sunnis, who are dominant in regions
that lack oil reserves and fear the Kurds won't
share oil revenues.
Turkey, which has been fighting a Kurdish insurgency
for decades, also has warned Iraq against such a
move.
The U.S. military reported late Monday that a U.S.
soldier was killed by a vehicle-bomb in Kirkuk.
There were no other reported car or truck bombings
in the city Monday.
The attacker rammed the truck into the concrete
blast barriers protecting the back of the compound
at about 11:30 a.m., Kirkuk police spokesman Brig.
Gen. Sarhat Qadir said.
Qadir, the Kirkuk police spokesman, said many of a
group of 20 children walking home from a nearby
school were among the 187 wounded in the truck
bombing.
The ancient city of Kirkuk has a large minority of
ethnic Turks as well as Christians, Shiite and Sunni
Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians. The city is just
south of the Kurdistan autonomous zone stretching
across three provinces of northeastern Iraq.
Iraq's constitution sets an end-of-the-year deadline
for a referendum on the status of Kirkuk, where
Kurds now are believed a majority of the population.
That means a referendum on attaching the city to the
Kurdish autonomous zone would pass easily.
AP
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein 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 is a Kurdistani city and it lies just
south border of the Kurdistan autonomous region and
it is not under the full control of Kurdistan
Regional Government administration, its population
is a mix of majority Kurds and minority of Arabs,
Turkmen.
Based on Iraq's Constitution 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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