1.

23 KILLED IN KIRKUK SUICIDE BOMBING
By Yehia Barzanji

Associated Press
June 15, 2005

Original source: Boston Globe

KIRKUK -- A suicide bomber struck outside a bank as elderly men and women waited to cash their pension checks yesterday, killing 23 people and wounding nearly 100 in this oil-rich northern city that has become a flashpoint for sectarian tension.

Elsewhere, five Iraqi soldiers were killed and two wounded in a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint in Kan'an, 30 miles north of Baghdad, and the bodies of 24 men -- apparently victims of recent ambushes -- were brought to a hospital in the capital.

A U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bombing targeting a U.S. convoy in southern Baghdad, according to the military, which also said that two soldiers assigned to a Marine unit were killed in a similar attack Monday in the western city of Ramadi.

The violence in Kirkuk was the worst to hit the ethnically mixed city, 180 miles north of Baghdad, since the war started in 2003. The largest previous attack was the Sept. 4 suicide car bombing outside an Iraqi police academy in the city that killed 20 people.

A man wearing a belt packed with explosives blew himself up outside the Rafidiyan Bank just after it opened yesterday morning, said General Sherko Shakir, Kirkuk's police chief.

A crowd of street vendors and elderly men and women waiting outside the bank bore the brunt of the blast, and a pregnant woman and several children were among the victims.

Body parts were strewn about in a 20-yard radius from the scene of the explosion, which occurred near a pedestrian bridge. Several bodies were under the wreckage and at least two parked cars nearby were set ablaze.

"It was the biggest awful crime in Kirkuk since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime," Shakir said.

Al Qaeda's northern affiliate, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for both suicide bombings in northern Iraq and threatened more violence in retaliation for the arrests and killings of Sunni Arabs.

The U.S. soldier was killed on the 230th anniversary of the formation of the U.S. Army. At least 1,704 US military members have died since the war began in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Also yesterday, U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers killed five Iraqi civilians at an entrance to the volatile western town of Ramadi shortly after a suicide attack on a military checkpoint left one Iraqi soldier dead, the military said.

Insurgents have launched deadly attacks in Kirkuk apparently seeking to foment ethnic tension in the city populated Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, and Turkmens.

The motives behind the Kirkuk attack were unclear, but it coincided with the swearing in of veteran guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani as the first president of Iraq's northern Kurdistan region in nearby Irbil, 50 miles north of Kirkuk.

Kurds have long coveted Kirkuk as the capital of an autonomous Kurdish region encompassing all three of their northern provinces.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, speaking in parliament after the Kirkuk attack, also accused the insurgents of targeting civilians.

Jaafari's 37-member government was overwhelmingly approved on a vote of confidence in the 275-member parliament. But the government has been criticized for its inability to stop insurgent attacks.

2.

SUICIDE ATTACK KILLS 22 IN ATTACK AT AN IRAQ BANK
By Edward Wong

** Timed to Kill Pensioners -- Assault in an Area of Rich Oil Fields May Signal a Fight for Its Control **

New York Times
June 15, 2005
Page A01

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/international/middleeast/14cnd-iraq.html

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber blew himself up today in a crowd of retirees lining up to receive their pensions in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 22 people and injuring 80 others, including women and children, police and hospital officials said.

The bombing took place at 10:30 a.m. local time, as the retirees were waiting in front of Al Rafidain Bank, said Maj. Gen. Shirko Shakir Hakim, a police chief in the Kirkuk police force.

The main hospital in Kirkuk overflowed for hours with victims, and those with minor wounds were ushered out to make room for the more serious cases.

"Enough with terrorism and killings," said an elderly woman, who sat sobbing on the street near the debris of the blast site.

She said she did not know whether her son, who was selling children's toys near the bank, was alive or not. "We're tired and we want God to help us just as he helped his prophets. I beseech him to help the Iraqi people to stop the bloodshed."

Bombings of large groups of civilians have happened only sporadically in this war, and the Kirkuk assault aroused fears of a new and troubling phase of the violence.

Kirkuk, which sits atop some of Iraq's richest oil fields, is coveted by the country's major ethnic and sectarian groups, and for that reason is considered the most politically precarious city in Iraq.

The question of who will administer the city is expected to be one of the most contentious issues during the writing of the permanent constitution, and there are fears that large-scale civil strife could engulf the city if political solutions are not carefully laid out.

The attack, the deadliest in Kirkuk since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government, was the worst in a series of assaults on a particularly violent day here. Five Iraqi policemen were killed when a suicide car bomb rammed into a checkpoint outside the city of Baquba, 35 miles northeast of the capital, a police official in Baquba said. The American military said a soldier was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while on patrol in Baghdad today, and two soldiers died from a roadside bomb explosion near the western provincial capital of Ramadi on Monday.

The Second Marine Division said Marines accidentally killed five civilians and wounded four others today after firing at two cars speeding toward a checkpoint near Ramadi. The cars had approached the checkpoint shortly after an insurgent had tried ramming into the checkpoint with a suicide car bomb, the Marines said in a statement.

One of Baghdad's main hospitals reported that it received two groups of bodies on Monday night totaling 24 people who apparently had been executed. Seventeen were Iraqi truck drivers who transport goods to companies in the capital, the Interior Ministry official said. The other seven were also believed to be working in convoys, but included among them at least one Nepali man, the official said.

In a speech before the Iraqi National Assembly today, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite Arab prime minister, said that the government was trying to solve the impasse over Kirkuk, but that it was difficult to balance the political demands of the city's Kurds and Arabs.

Most of those killed in the bombing today were Kurds, police officials said.

The injured flooded into hospital wards, and American soldiers and Iraqi policemen in blue uniforms tried to cordon off the blast site, stepping around pools of blood, shards of glass, and charred metal wreckage.

Tens of thousands of Kurds who say they were displaced from Kirkuk during the rule of Mr. Hussein have moved back in droves and are threatening to force out the Arabs whom Mr. Hussein relocated there. At the same time, the Turkmens, an ethnic group originating in Central Asia, entertain notions of regaining political dominance of the city, which they held under the Ottoman Empire, when Turkish sultans appointed the Turkmens as their proxy rulers in the area.

Kirkuk lies within Tamim province, which holds strong elements of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency. On June 7, three suicide car bombs exploded simultaneously at checkpoints ringing the rebel stronghold of Hawija, about 30 miles from Kirkuk, killing at least 20 people and wounding 30 others.

Iraqi and American officials have said they fear the violence in Kirkuk could increase as the various political parties in the National Assembly begin to negotiate over the constitution. The Kurds are lobbying for Kirkuk to be brought under the administration of the Kurdistan regional government, while the dominant Shiite Arabs say Kirkuk must remain under the control of a central authority.

The fight over Kirkuk extends even beyond Iraq's border. The Turkish government, ever wary of Kurdish independence, is insisting that the city not fall under Kurdish control, giving the Kurds the oil revenues they need to become independent of the central state. Dr. Jaafari told the National Assembly today that he had tried to address those concerns in a recent conversation with Turkish officials.

But the very Kurdish returnees who cause the Turks such concern, by swinging the demographic balance in the Kurds' favor, were the victims of "political repatriation" under Mr. Hussein's rule, Dr. Jaafari said, pushed out and replaced by Arabs who were moved into the city by Mr. Hussein for "demographic reasons."

"There are two contradictory problems," the Iraqi prime minister said.

Dr. Jaafari was speaking after the 275-member National Assembly had voted to approve his cabinet. Far to the north, in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, a longtime militia leader, was sworn in as the head of the Kurdish regional government. At the ceremony, Kurdish officials vowed to retain broad autonomy for Kurdistan in the new Iraq and publicly touted the right of the Kurds to govern Kirkuk.

Joost R. Hiltermann, the head of the Middle East office of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization, said in a recent interview that the White House should ensure that the national Iraqi government administers Kirkuk rather than the Kurds. Otherwise, he said, the potential for large-scale civil conflict will increase.

--An Iraqi employee of the New York Times, whose name is being withheld for security reasons, contributed reporting from Kirkuk for this article.

3.

EIGHTEEN DEAD IN SUICIDE ATTACK
By Aref Mohammed

Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia)
June 14, 2005

http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,15614276%255E1702,00.html

A SUICIDE bomber has killed at least 18 people and wounded 53 at a crowded market in the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk.

The bomber walked up to people shopping at the market in the centre of the ethnically mixed city, leaving a scene of devastation with blood pooled on the street, police said.

"According to initial reports, a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt blew himself up," Kirkuk police chief Major General Torhan Abdul Qader said.

Police and passers-by struggled to help the wounded and load the bloodied bodies of the dead onto pick-up trucks.

Kirkuk, 250km north of Baghdad, is coveted by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, and is a focus of concern about ethnic tensions in Iraq's potentially wealthy northern oil region.

The motive for the attack was unclear but it came shortly before veteran Kurdish nationalist leader Masoud Barzani was to have been formally sworn in to the new post of elected president of the autonomous region at a ceremony in Arbil.

Kurds want Kirkuk as their capital.

The city lies on the plain, 25km from the frontier of the mountainous Kurdish area, which comprises three of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Meanwhile, a suicide car bomber killed five Iraqi soldiers when he attacked a patrol in Kenaan, 20km east of the town near Baquba, north-west of Baghdad, police said.

Three other soldiers and two civilians were wounded, a doctor at Baquba hospital, Ahmed Fuad, said.

Insurgents also hit Kenaan police station with mortars, setting it ablaze, police said.

There has been a surge of suicide car bombings in Iraq since a new Shiite-led Government was formed two months ago, with many targeting Iraqi security forces.