BAGHDAD, 3 April 2007 — A suicide bomber slaughtered a group of nine children in the northern oil city of Kirkuk and suspected Sunni militants executed 21 Shiite workers as bloodshed in Iraq raged yesterday.
The bomber blew up his truck full of flour and explosives near a primary school and police station in Kirkuk, killing a total 12 people, including the nine children, police and medics said.
Another 178 people were wounded in the blast that caused extensive damage at a time when US troops were visiting the police station, Kirkuk district police commander Maj. Gen. Torhan Yussef Abdul Rahman said. Just one policeman was among the dead. The other two victims were women, accident and emergency doctor, Abdullah Mahmoud, told AFP.
Many of the casualties were pupils at the nearby school and local residents, after the suicide bomber blew up the truck outside the criminal investigations department in the predominantly Kurdish district of Rahimawa, Rahman said.
The suicide bomber was driving a truck packed with supplies of flour before he blew up his deadly charge, police said. It was the second such attack in northern Iraq in less than a week, as insurgents seemingly take advantage of food rationing to lull civilians into a false sense of security before unleashing carnage.
Last Tuesday, at least 85 people were killed when a suicide truck bomb rigged with explosives underneath sack loads of flour blew up in a Shiite area of the town of Tal Afar, prompting a revenge massacre of Sunni Arab men.
Fifth-year schoolgirl Naz Omar, who sustained shrapnel wounds to her head and legs, described the horrific scene after the blast. “We were at the last lesson and we heard the explosion. I saw two of my classmates sitting near the window. They fell on the floor, drenched in blood,” Naz told AFP.
“They could not speak. I was terrified. I said God is Great. I need my mother. I need my father,” she said adding that books in the classroom were covered in blood. Fourth-year pupil Buthayna Mahmoud said she saw some classmates burning. “It was horrific. Everyone I saw was wearing the blue school uniform drenched with blood.”
A wounded policeman said US troops had also suffered casualties in the attack but there was no immediate confirmation from the US military. An AFP correspondent saw television footage of five wounded American troops, including two who were tied on stretchers.
One of them had a bandaged head. Insurgent attacks are common in Kirkuk, which sits atop a third of the country’s oil resources and is home to a fractious ethnic and sectarian mix.
Long-standing Kurdish demands for the city to be incorporated into their autonomous region in northern Iraq are due to be put to a referendum before the end of the year.
In another brutal attack, suspected Sunni militants massacred a group of 21 Shiite workers north of Baghdad, away from a US-Iraqi military crackdown in the capital.
Traveling in three minibuses, the 21 Shiite workers drove straight into an ambush on the main road out of Baghdad to neighboring Diyala, now the second most dangerous province in Iraq after the capital itself.
The 21 Shiites, together with six Kurdish colleagues who were also snatched but who are still missing, worked in Baghdad’s popular Shorja market where 60 people were killed in a double suicide bombing last Thursday.
Medics said their handcuffed and blindfolded bodies were found near a water treatment plant in Morariyah village in Diyala after daybreak.
In the Shiite town of Khalis in the same province, a roadside bomb killed five people and wounded 23, including 16 women, yesterday, police said. Coordinated bomb attacks in a market in the same town last Thursday left more than 40 people dead. Dozens of people are kidnapped and executed every week by armed gangs from Iraq’s rival Shiite and Sunni communities.
Such sectarian killings were particularly prevalent in Baghdad, but US commanders have reported a reduction in the death toll since launching a massive security crackdown with Iraqi troops designed to stabilize the capital.
Over the weekend, two coordinated roadside bomb attacks in southwest Baghdad also killed six US soldiers, four of them in the second blast targeting a response team sent to the site of the first deadly explosion.
Yet US White House hopeful and Republican Sen. John McCain boasted to a group of reporters on Sunday about “encouraging signs” on the capital’s streets where he and three colleagues walked and shopped in the Bab Sharqi market.
