Kirkuk bombs kill 2, injure dozens

Feb. 3, 07

BAGHDAD (AP) — Eight bombs exploded within two hours Saturday in mostly Arab parts of Kirkuk, killing at least two people, wounding more than 40 and threatening to sharpen tensions among ethnic groups competing for control of the oil-rich region in northern Iraq.

Elsewhere, violence erupted in two other cities north of Baghdad, even as the U.S. gears up for a major security operation in the capital. Gunmen brandished weapons in the northern industrial city of Beiji, four days after the government claimed a major al-Qaeda cell had been broken there.

The attacks in Kirkuk started about 9:40 a.m. when a suicide car bomber tried to drive into the offices of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, police said.

Guards opened fire on the car, but the attacker was able to detonate his explosives about 15 meters (yards) from the building, killing at least two people and wounding 30, including five KDP guards, police Col. Dishtoun Mohammed said.

Concrete blast walls protected the offices from serious damage, but the explosion knocked the KDP sign off the top of the building and devastated four nearby houses. The charred hulks of five cars were near the entrance of the Kurdish building, which is in a mainly Turkomen district in eastern Kirkuk.

A sixth car bomb wounded five other people after it exploded at 11:50 a.m. in the mainly Arab al-Wasiti area in southern Kirkuk, while two roadside bombs targeted police patrols at about the same time in a predominantly Christian area in the north of the city.

The surge in violence north of the capital comes as Arab and Turkmen population in Kirkuk are fighting Kurdish efforts to join the city to the their semiautonomous region just to the north. Thrown into that ethnic cauldron are Armenian and Assyrian-Chaldean Christian minorities.

Razqar Ali, a Kurdish leader and head of Kirkuk provincial council, accused the militants of trying to destabilize the city as Kurds seek to incorporate it into their autonomous region to the north.

"The terrorists want to destabilize the city of Kirkuk. They want to depict the city as unsafe to provide a pretext to other groups to interfere," he said, an implicit reference to Turkey's objections to the Kurdish efforts.

"We are upset and angry about the existence of a KDP party office in our area," Um Khalid, a 52-year-old Turkomen housewife, said as she examined her house that was damaged in the blast. "Had the office not been here, the suicide bomber would not have chosen to explode his car near our houses."

Another car bomb exploded about 20 minutes later near a girls' school in the south of the city, but the facility was closed for the weekend and no casualties were reported, police Col. Anwar Hassan said.

A third car bomb hit a gas station at 10:10 a.m. in southern Kirkuk, wounding three civilians, followed by two other parked car bombs 20 minutes later near a popular pastry shop that wounded five people in the southern half of the city.

Mohammed Faleh, who works in the Shaima pastry shop in an area near the main road to Baghdad, said it would be the fourth time they would have to replace windows after being hit by three previous blasts.

"I heard the sound of the explosion as I was adding water to the flour inside the shop. I rushed outside to see smoke and fire rising from the car bombs while some moving cars were colliding with each other," Faleh said. "I saw wounded people being taken away by some shop owners to the hospital."

In a bid to prevent more violence, provincial police chief Gen. Sherko Shakir imposed a 4 p.m.-7 a.m. curfew on the city.

Clashes between heavily armed insurgents and Iraqi forces also raged for several hours in Mosul, northwest of Kirkuk, causing authorities to impose a temporary curfew on the city. There was no immediate word on casualties. Police spokesman Brig. Abdul Karim al-Jubouri said Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. air power were moving to control the situation.

Gunmen also attacked a police checkpoint at the northern entrance to Samarra 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing four policemen and wounding another, police said, adding that three militants were killed and one was wounded in the fighting that lasted for about 30 minutes.

In Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, a convoy of 15 cars carrying gunmen brandishing weapons and banners declaring the establishment of an "Islamic State" drove through the Sunni town while businessmen quickly closed their stores for fear of trouble.

The show of force followed the Iraqi government's announcement on Tuesday that it had arrested a provincial leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and broken a major cell in the area.