KIRKUK, Iraq, 11 August 2007 — A car bomb tore through a bustling fruit and vegetable market in Iraq’s city of Kirkuk yesterday, killing seven people and wounding more than 40 in a mass of charred metal from incinerated stalls.
The attack in a Kurdish neighborhood of the ethnically fraught oil center that Iraqi Kurds want to make part of their autonomous region in the north, came after a US military helicopter was forced down, south of Baghdad.
And the UN Security Council agreed yesterday to expand the United Nations mission in Iraq. A car packed with explosives ripped through the Al-Hurriyah market in eastern Kirkuk killing seven people, four of them ripped into chunks of raw flesh, said Brig. Gen. Burhan Hamid Tayeb, police chief in the city.
Other police commanders said two women and a child were among the dead. Rescue workers rushed another 47 people to medical treatment, 10 of them in a serious condition, said police Col. Bastun Mahmud at the Azadi hospital.
Fifteen cars and 25 market stalls were damaged by the force of the pre-lunchtime blast, said Tayeb, as civilians joined rescue workers to pick their way through the debris. Troubled by its oil wealth and fraught mosaic of Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen communities, Kirkuk is a favored hotspot for a mesh of militants operating in Iraq’s brutal sectarian conflict and overlapping insurgency.
An earlier roadside bomb against a police patrol in the city, killed one civilian and wounded six people, including a child, said Captain Atta Abdallah. A man was also killed yesterday inside his shop in a drive-by shooting in Kirkuk, police Capt. Shawan Abdallah said.
South of Baghdad, the US military said a helicopter came down in a rebel hotspot during a raid and that two US soldiers were hurt. The military could not immediately confirm or deny whether the aircraft had come under fire.
“Initial reports from ground forces do not clearly identify the cause of the mishap while in transit to the proposed target.” Asked whether the helicopter had come under fire and pressed for further details, a military spokesman said this was still being investigated.
In the northern city of Mosul, extremists dragged three Iraqi policemen into the center of the city and shot them dead in broad daylight watched by nervous onlookers, Brig. Gen. Abdelkarim Khalaf Al-Juburi said.
The UN Security Council agreed yesterday to expand the United Nations mission in Iraq despite the persistent high level of insecurity in the country and resistance by UN staff. The resolution presented by the United States and Britain, approved unanimously by the council’s 15 members, extends the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), which expired yesterday, by one year.
Besides permitting the expansion of the UNAMI staff on the ground in Iraq, the resolution paves the way for a UN special envoy “as circumstances permit,” to “advise, support and assist” the Iraqi government in political, economic, electoral, legal, constitutional, refugee and human rights matters.
