BAGHDAD, 14 May 2007 — A suicide truck bomber crashed into the offices of a Kurdish political party yesterday, killing at least 50 people and wounding scores, including a mayor, officials said. It was the second suicide attack in Kurdish areas of the north in four days.
A parked car bomb also exploded near a market in central Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 17 Iraqis, wounding 46 and damaging shops, police said.
Meanwhile, an Al-Qaeda front group said yesterday that it had captured several US soldiers in the attack a day earlier south of Baghdad that killed five and left three missing. The US said 4,000 troops were searching the farming area south of the capital for any sign of the three missing American soldiers.
In a statement posted on an website, the Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack in Mahmudiya on Saturday and said it held an unspecified number of US soldiers. The group offered no proof to back up its claim but promised more details later.
US President George W. Bush was getting regular updates on the missing soldiers, Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said in Washington.
The search for the missing Americans began after insurgents attacked a patrol of seven US soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter before dawn Saturday near Mahmudiya.
The US military said Saturday that five people were dead and three were missing. Yesterday, US spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell confirmed that the Iraqi interpreter was among the dead, and that all the missing were Americans. He said about 4,000 US troops were involved in the search.
Caldwell said the bodies of the three slain soldiers and the Iraqi interpreter had been identified, but the military was still working to identify the fifth.
Mahmudiya is about 30 km south of Baghdad in an Al-Qaeda-dominated area known as the “triangle of death.” Two US soldiers were found killed there last year after they disappeared at a checkpoint.
With violence on the rise, Caldwell also announced that an additional 3,000 forces have been sent to Diyala province, scene of heavy fighting.
The 10:30 a.m. suicide truck bomb attack in Makhmur, 50 km south of Irbil, badly damaged the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Makhmur is just south of the autonomous Kurdish-controlled areas, but it has a substantial Kurdish population.
The blast also killed the police chief and damaged the mayor’s office.
Ziryan Othman, the health minister of the Kurdish regional government, said at least 50 people were killed and 115 were wounded, including the city’s mayor, Abdul Rahman Delaf, who is also a prominent Kurdish writer and the director of the KDP office.
Cars were charred and crushed by the blast. Much of the small KDP building appeared to have been destroyed, reduced to a pile of bricks. Other buildings had walls blown out.
Herish Karim, a 42-year-old Kurdish taxi driver, said he was parking his car in the area when the “thunderous” explosion occurred, setting the KDP building on fire, shattering the windows of his car and injuring his chest and right arm.
Many of the wounded were brought to a hospital in Irbil. Wounded men with bandages on their heads and arms wandered the halls, while doctors worked on a patient.
Outside, security guards closed the hospital to visitors and read a list containing the names of the wounded who had been admitted.
Hearing the names of his son and daughter, Qassim Amin, 61, a Kurd, thanked God that they had not been killed. Both are employees at the KDP party office, he said. “Makhmur is an open, peaceful area, and Al-Qaeda is trying to destabilize it by causing fighting between Arabs and Kurds,” Amin said.
In Baghdad, the parked car exploded near a popular market in the center of the city, killing at least 17 people and wounding 46, police said. The blast occurred at 2:45 p.m. on the Wathba Square near the Sadriyah market, one of the main commercial areas in the capital.
