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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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September 10th,
2009 - Blast Near Mosul Kills at Least 25 |
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Blast Near
Mosul Kills at Least 25 By Marc Santora New York Times September 10, 2009 Baghdad - A huge explosion
in a small Kurdish village in northern Iraq on Thursday left scores dead and
wounded and raised renewed concern that insurgents are exploiting ethnic
tensions and political wrangling to establish new bases for strikes across
the country. The blast, in Wardak,
outside the divided and violent city of Mosul, killed 25 people, according to
Kurdish officials, and was so powerful that it flattened a dozen houses.
Residents worked through the night to pull victims from the rubble and treat
the 43 people who were wounded. The death toll from the
blast might have been worse, officials said, had they not stopped a second
truck packed with explosives before the vehicle’s driver could detonate them.
The driver was killed by the Kurdish pesh merga forces that provide security
for the area, the officials said. Wardak is a tiny village,
with only about 300 houses, made mostly of mud with wood ceilings. Three
sides of the village are protected by sand berms, with a shallow river
providing a fourth barrier. Nevertheless, two suicide bombers drove through
the river under the cover of night, arriving shortly after midnight, local
officials said. While the pesh merga fired
at the first driver, he still managed to reach the town and detonate his
bomb, officials said. “I was in my house when I
heard shooting,” said Amjad Kamel, 49. “There was more shooting and then I
heard a huge explosion.” His roof collapsed, he said,
and in the darkness it seemed to him as if he had been swept away in a
sandstorm. Many people in the village
were sleeping on their rooftops, trying to keep cool in the extreme heat of
an Iraqi summer, and local officials said that was fortunate because it
allowed many to escape being crushed when their houses collapsed. Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s
president and the highest ranking Kurdish member of the government, released
a statement condemning the killings. Security officials say that
in recent weeks extremists had been seeking to aggravate the already tense
relations between Iraq’s Shiite-led government in Baghdad and the largely
autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan in the north. On Wednesday, eight people
were killed in the northern city of Kirkuk when a car rigged with explosives
blew up; the local police said they believed the car had been intended for
use in a suicide attack but had exploded prematurely. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish
member of Parliament, said political fighting between Kurdish leaders and the
government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was the main reason that
security in Nineveh Province, where the bombing took place, had remained a
problem. “No security can be
maintained in such an unstable political atmosphere,” he said. “Terrorists
exploit such situations.” Even as Americans prepare to
withdraw from Iraq, they are trying to refocus their attention on the
northern region, particularly the boundary between Kurdistan and the rest of
the country, which they call the fault line. Gen. Ray Odierno, the
American commander in Iraq, said that there had been discussions about
forming joint patrols in the north, but that no agreement had been reached. “One thing that’s been clear
in the discussions we’ve had is that all parties involved are concerned about
Al Qaeda and the fact that they’re exploiting the disputed areas,” he said in
an interview this week. “And everyone wants to stop Al Qaeda’s capability to
exploit these areas.” Mr. Othman said that Kurdish
forces would like to see the Americans step up their role in the area, but
that Arab and Turkmen leaders were wary because of the longstanding ties
between the United States and the Kurds. Insurgent attacks continued
in and around Baghdad on Thursday, with at least 4 people killed and 37
wounded in three separate bombings. In Diyala Province, an
ethnically and religiously mixed area that has long harbored extremists, a
suicide bomber attacked a convoy carrying a local political leader. The
leader, Ahmed al-Zarkoshi, was unharmed but a bystander was killed along with
the attacker, and seven more people were wounded. In an attack in the town of
Hilla, south of Baghdad, two bombs hidden inside Pepsi cartons exploded at a
local market, according to a security official in the town. At least 2 people
were killed and 20 wounded. The bombing followed what residents said were gun
battles between Iraqi security forces and insurgents. Abeer Mohammed and Steven
Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad and an Iraqi employee of The New
York Times from Mosul, Iraq. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html |