ARBIL, Sept 10: A massive suicide bomb shattered the relative calm of Iraq’s Kurdish north on Tuesday night, killing one child and wounding dozens of people, including four US intelligence officials.
The attack in a smart residential area of Arbil came as US forces moved to keep a lid on tension on another front, launching a crackdown on an armed Iraqi militia in Najaf.
And in Baghdad, two US soldiers were killed trying to defuse a bomb and American troops killed one Iraqi policeman during a spurt of nearly two dozen attacks on occupation forces in a 24-hour period.
Iraqi and US officials said the suicide bomb in Arbil set off in a car caused widespread destruction in the Shorash neighbourhood, which has several villas rented for the American occupation effort.
Major James Bullion, a US military spokesman, said that “I believe three people were killed — two small children and an elderly woman” in the blast that rocked a city previously spared major violence.
But a spokesman for the US forces in Baghdad confirmed only one death in the blast and an emergency medical official in Arbil said a four-year-old died in hospital from his injuries.
Major Bullion said a total of 41 people were wounded in the huge blast, six of them US defence personnel. Although he declined to say whether the injured Americans were uniformed soldiers or defence department civilian personnel, another official said four of the injured were intelligence personnel.
Karim Sinjari, interior minister of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) administration that runs the region around Arbil, said the car was packed with more than 150 kilograms of explosives.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which US and Iraqi authorities said was a suicide bombing.
“I saw body parts in a nearby garden; we are sure these body parts are from the bomber,” a Kurdish official said. Most of the victims were women and children, hospital officials said.
The attack was the latest in a series of car bombings that have killed about 120 people, including the top UN official in Baghdad and revered Shia leader Ayatollah Baqer Hakim.
It came five days after Kurdish officials said they had foiled a major bomb plot in northern Iraq by suspected members of the Ansar al Islam group, accused by Washington of having ties with the Al Qaeda network.
While battling to tame guerillas in central and western Iraq, US officials had taken comfort in the relatively secure situation in the northern Kurdish area.
22 ATTACKS: The US-led forces suffered 22 separate attacks in a 24-hour period on Tuesday and Wednesday, sharply up on the daily average of 13 to 15, a spokesman said. He gave no casualty figures.
In the latest attacks, an American soldier was killed in Baghdad on Wednesday when an “improvised explosive device” he was trying to defuse went off.
In another incident, American troops shot dead one Iraqi policeman and seriously wounded another after a bomb struck their convoy on the outskirts of the hotspot town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad.
The soldiers opened fire indiscriminately after four of their comrades were wounded by the roadside bomb, witnesses Jalil Nawaf Daoud and Ismail Abed al Issawi said.—AFP