Agence France Presse — English
March 27, 2007 Tuesday 5:53 PM GMT
Iraq violence slaughters nearly 80
by Mujahid Mohammed
MOSUL, Iraq, March 27 2007
A suicide bomber tricked soldiers into believing he was bringing food
supplies to a northern Iraqi town on Tuesday in the deadliest of a
spate of attacks that killed nearly 80 people nationwide.
The blast ripped through Tal Afar, unleashing carnage and destroying
buildings after a crowd of hungry Iraqis surrounded the vehicle that
residents and soldiers believed was a supply convoy following a week
of food shortages.
Just moments after being waved into the area by Iraqi soldiers, the
bomber detonated his cargo of flour and explosives, killing and
wounding those around just three days after a marketplace suicide
attack in the same town.
An Iraqi army officer told AFP that 55 people were killed and at
least 125 wounded in the truck bombing and a separate car bombing in
the same town of some 200,000 people, unable to specify a separate
toll break-down.
The US military, which scrambled helicopters to evacuate the wounded
to US medical facilities, said several buildings collapsed in the
explosion that blasted a 15-metre (50-foot) diametre crater out of
the ground.
Tuesday’s bombings raised further concerns about escalating
insecurity in the mixed Shiite-Sunni town after US President George
W. Bush last year held it up as a model for coalition efforts to
create a stable Iraq.
On March 20, 2006 Bush hailed the onetime militant stronghold as "a
free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq". Since then,
Iraqi violence has risen so high that even the Pentagon has cited
elements of civil war.
The Tal Afar attacks came just hours after US forces in Iraq said
they had arrested two leaders of a network suspected of killing about
900 civilians and wounding nearly 2,000 others in a campaign of car
bombings.
Haytham Kazim Abdallah al-Shimari and Haydar Rashid Nasir al-Shammari
al-Jafar were detained separately on March 21 in the north Baghdad
Sunni rebel bastion of Adhamiyah, the US military said.
Tuesday’s truck bomber mimicked tactics deployed in the south Baghdad
insurgent stronghold of Dura last Saturday when a bomber disguised as
a merchant bringing building supplies to a police station killed 20
people.
The bombings gave credence to US statements that while a new security
crackdown has seen a decline in execution-style killings, a hallmark
of Shiite militias, the big car bombs associated with Sunni militants
have carried on.
Over the past four years, tens of thousands of people have been
killed in the insurgent and sectarian violence, most of them in
Baghdad, triggering Washington to launch a last-ditch security
crackdown last month.
Elsewhere, bombings and mortar and small-arms fire killed another 23
Iraqis.
Two mortar rounds slammed into the Abu Chir district of Dura, where
Iraqi and US forces have been concentrated under the new security
crackdown.
Two children, a man and a woman were killed, while another 14 people
were wounded.
Gunmen opened fire in the capital’s biggest market killing two
civilians and wounding seven, a security official said.
A suicide bomber who blew up a vehicle near Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah
University killed one policeman and wounded three. College campuses
have become a frequent target for insurgent bombings.
South of Baghdad, four people died in Iskandiriyah when unidentified
gunmen opened fire on a Sunni funeral cortege, army officer Mohammed
al-Tahi said.
In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, gunmen broke into the home of two
elderly Armenian women and shot the two longtime residents of the
city, police Captain Imad Jassim said.
One of the women was aged 80 and the other in her 60s, the officer
said.
Mass emigration has seen Iraq’s Christian communities slump to just
700,000 people among a total population of 27 million.