BAGHDAD, 19 September 2006 — At least 62 people were killed around Iraq yesterday, 21 of them in a suicide attack on people waiting for their butane gas ration cards in the northern city of Tall Afar. A suicide bomber, wearing an explosive belt, approached a crowd waiting for the ration cards in downtown Tall Afar, and exploded himself, a police official said. Two policemen were among the dead and 17 were wounded.
The day’s other big attack came in Ramadi, where a bomber struck at around 3:00 p.m. (1100 GMT) in the Al-Hurriyah police station in the southwest of the Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold, killing 13 people, a police officer said. The Hurriyah police station oversees the restive Tamim neighborhood, one of the more dangerous areas of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province. Anbar has been a key battleground in the conflict between US troops and insurgents and the province has accounted for the bulk of the US military’s losses.
In other attacks, 28 people were killed, including four members of a Shiite family shot dead by gunmen as they attempted to flee their homes north of Baghdad. After receiving repeated threats in their home in the restive provincial capital of Baquba, the family packed their belongings in a pickup truck and fled, only to be stopped on the road by gunmen who riddled their car with bullets, killing four and wounding five.
Gunmen also killed two other Shiites busy packing up their belongings in a small town just to the west of Baquba, while 10 other people, three of them soldiers, were killed elsewhere in Diyala, a province where sectarian violence is equaled only by that in Baghdad itself.
The genocide trial of Saddam Hussein heard gripping testimony yesterday from a former Kurdish guerilla on how he and fellow villagers were scorched by poison gas, while the ousted Iraqi ruler cited US chemical attacks in Vietnam. Karwan Abdallah Tawfiq, who at the time of the 1987-1988 attacks on Iraq’s Kurds was a radio operator for peshmerga rebels, described how his village was bombed and he fled with other villagers into the hills over the dead bodies of the victims.
