Bomb Attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk Leave Dozens Dead
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SABRINA TAVERNISE
nytimes.com
BAGHDAD — Female bombers struck Kurdish political protesters in Kirkuk and Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad on Monday morning, leaving at least 48 people dead and 249 wounded in one of the bloodiest sequences of attacks in Iraq this year.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, at least 24 people were killed and 187 wounded, after a female suicide bomber blew herself up amid thousands of Kurdish demonstrators who had gathered near the provincial headquarters building, said Brig. Gen. Burhan Tayyib Taha of the Iraqi police in Kirkuk. The bombing immediately set the city on edge. Many Kurds believed the city’s ethnic Turkmen were behind the blast and retaliated by attacking the headquarters of Turkmen political parties.
In the attacks in Baghdad, three women used suicide vests and a bomb in a bag to make strikes just minutes apart, killing 24 people, all apparently Shiite pilgrims marching in a festival, according to an official at the Interior Ministry. The dead included at least four children, one of them an infant, and there were at least 62 other people wounded, according to police officials and witnesses.
In Kirkuk, a city long considered a tinderbox because of its volatile ethnic mix of Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs, rival parties traded accusations about the violence that followed the initial blast.
A Kurdish member of the provincial council, Mohammed Kamal, accused Turkmen extremists of carrying out the attack and said that after the blast, shots had been fired at panicked Kurdish demonstrators from a nearby building owned by Turkmen. “Many protesters were killed and injured by the shooting,” he said.
General Taha denied that Turkmen — or anyone else — had subsequently attacked the Kurdish demonstrators, though he said security forces who arrived to secure the scene and take the wounded to the hospital had shot into the air to clear the route for ambulances and police cars.
He said the demonstrators had “burned Turkmen buildings and they burned many cars.”
Farouk Abdullah, a senior Turkmen politician, said offices belonging to every Turkmen political party in the city had been attacked following the bombing. Mr. Abdullah said the Kurdish rioters had destroyed a number of Turkmen buildings and that many Turkmen political officials inside had been injured.
“We don’t know why they attacked us,” he said. “We did not have anything to do with the explosion.”
Security forces instituted a curfew.
The three bombers in Baghdad struck in the central Karrada neighborhood, apparently using their flowing black robes, known as abayas, to carry explosives past checkpoints and the Iraqi policemen who were guarding marchers heading toward the Kadhamiya shrine in northern Baghdad for a religious festival that culminates on Tuesday.
The attacks — about five minutes apart — started shortly before 8 a.m., when a woman, walking amid the crowd close to the National Theater building, blew herself up. The blast killed 10 and wounded 15 others, said an Iraqi Army officer who was at the scene, as he lifted a baby into an ambulance. Flip-flops and slippers of the dead were gathered into a pile. The air was bitter from the bomb.
“It was here,” said Atheer Allawi, a police officer, planting his feet firmly on the asphalt, boxes scattered from the blast behind him. “We can’t search women. They are wearing abayas, and God knows what they can hide under them.”
Police officers interviewed at the scene said that the authorities had heard that six women would blow themselves up in the area, and that the leader, Um Ahmed, was wearing sunglasses. All the women were suspected to have been from an area south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, said an Iraqi police lieutenant at one blast site.
The second attack occurred inside a tent that provided shade and rest for female marchers. The female bomber walked into the tent, sat down and, according to a police official, Abu Ali, read the Koran with the women sitting inside. When she exited the tent, she left a bag behind, and moments later, it exploded, killing one and wounding four, he said.
The third Karrada bomb struck between two traffic police checkpoints, killing at least 13 and wounding at least 15. Nails that had been embedded in the attacker’s suicide vest were strewn about the asphalt.
“This was part of her belt,” said the police lieutenant, nudging a bent nail with the toe of his shoe. He said the woman had turned off the main street where the pilgrims were marching, after the earlier blasts caused soldiers and police officers to conduct more frequent searches. He said she was thought to be the leader of the group.
The violence did not deter the marchers, who continued down one of Baghdad’s main thoroughfares, waving green flags, and with Shiite religious songs blaring from loudspeakers. The procession headed toward a sacred shrine named for the Shiite saint Imam Kadhim, whose death the marchers were commemorating. “This is what is called the Iraqi faith and belief,” said Mr. Allawi, the police officer.
With reporting by an Iraqi employee in Kirkuk and by Suadad al-Salhy, Anwar J. Ali and Riyadh Muhammed in Baghdad.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company |
