13 Killed As Bomber Strikes in Iraq

Monday April 2, 2007 10:46 AM
By YAHYA BARZANJI
Associated Press Writer

KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) – A suicide truck bomber targeted a police station
in the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, killing at least 13
people and wounding dozens, including many children from a nearby
school, police said.

The attacker rammed the truck into the concrete blast barriers
protecting the back of the compound at about 11:30 a.m., detonating
his explosives, which were hidden under a load of flour, local police
spokesman Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said.

The Rahim Awa police compound is in a predominantly Kurdish
neighborhood in a northern part of the city, and other officials said
U.S. troops had been visiting an Iraqi criminal investigations unit
when the blast occurred.

AP Television News footage showed one U.S. soldier seen standing
nearby with a bandage around his head and blood on the front of his
uniform. The U.S. command in Baghdad said it was looking into the
report.

He said 13 people were killed and 137 wounded. He also said at least
20 children on their way home from a nearby school were among the
casualties, although he could not provide a breakdown of how many were
killed or injured. The force of the blast also devastated four
buildings in the area.

Doctors at the hospital worked in a scene of bloody pandemonium as
wounded were brought to the emergency room. There was barely room to
move.

Most of those being treated appeared to be either very young children
or schoolgirls, many crying and 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 attack comes days after the Iraqi government endorsed plans to
relocate thousands of Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk as part of Saddam
Hussein’s campaign to force ethnic Kurds out of the city in an effort
to undo one of the former dictator’s most enduring and hated policies.

Kurds are seeking to incorporate the city, 180 miles north of Baghdad,
and into their nearby autonomous region. But the move has met strong
opposition from Sunni Arabs who fear being isolated from Iraq’s oil
riches, which are concentrated in the north and the mainly Shiite
south.

Many have blamed a recent rise of violence in Kirkuk on Sunni
insurgents who fled Baghdad ahead of a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown
in the capital.

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 Kurdish autonomous zone
stretching across three provinces of northeastern Iraq.

Iraq’s constitution sets an end-of-the-year deadline for a referendum
on Kirkuk’s status. Since Saddam’s fall four years ago, thousands of
Kurds who once lived in the city have resettled there. It is now
believed Kurds are a majority of the population and that a referendum
on attaching Kirkuk to the Kurdish autonomous zone would pass easily.