BAGHDAD: A suicide truck bomber hit a Kurdish village in northern Iraq before dawn on Thursday, killing at least 22 people and injuring 30 others, officials said, in what appeared to be the latest in a string of attacks targeting Kurds and other ethnic and religious groups in the region.
Twin truck bomb attacks on the finance and foreign ministries last month triggered a diplomatic crisis when Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki blamed neighboring Syria for failing to hand over two of the alleged planners of the finance ministry bombing.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing on Thursday, but it bore the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgents who remain active in Mosul and surrounding areas in Ninevah province. A police officer and a health official in Mosul said the bomb went off around 12:30 a.m. in the village of Wardek, about 55 km southeast of the city — a region where US commanders have warned that insurgents appear to be trying to stoke an Arab-Kurdish conflict.
“The ongoing terrorist and criminal acts in Ninevah are aimed again at the Kurds, Turkomen, Shiites and Yizidis — they are ethnic cleansing operations in which hundreds of innocent people have been killed,” Abdul-Muhsin Al-Saadoun, a lawmaker of the Kurdistan Alliance parliamentary bloc, said at a press conference in Baghdad after the attack.
The officials in Mosul spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. Local security forces fired on the driver of the truck when he refused to stop, but he was still able to detonate his bomb. A second assailant in another explosives-laden truck was shot and killed before his bomb exploded.
About 250 families live in the village of simple mud-brick houses, scores of which were turned to rubble, while others had roofs caved in and windows blown out.
Residents picked through the ruins, pulling out what possessions they could and loading them onto pickup trucks. The villagers, Shiite Kurds from a small religious sect, blamed Al-Qaeda in Iraq for the attack.
“I’m certain that we were targeted by Al-Qaeda extremists as they consider us renegades,” said one resident, 53-year-old Haso Narmo.
Narmo’s family was injured when the blast brought down part of his house as they were sleeping. He said he drove relatives to a hospital for treatment.
“When I returned to the village this morning, it was like an earthquake had hit,” he said.
Insurgents in northern Iraq, who have maintained a stronghold in the city of Mosul, have frequently targeted remote villages and towns that depend on small security forces for protection.
