By Edward Wong
New York Times
15 June 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 14 - A suicide bomber blew himself up on Tuesday in a crowd of retirees lining up to receive their pensions in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 22 people and wounding 80 others, including women and children, police and hospital officials said.
The bombing took place at 10:30 a.m., as the retirees were waiting in front of the Rafidain Bank, said Maj. Gen. Shirko Shakir Hakim, a 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," she said. "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 analysts say the city could descend into large-scale civil strife 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 in Iraq. Five Iraqi policemen were killed when a suicide bomber's car 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 on Tuesday, 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 on Tuesday 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 written 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, an Interior Ministry official said. The other seven were also believed to be working in convoys, but included at least one Nepali man, the official said.
In a speech before the National Assembly on Tuesday, 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 on Tuesday were Kurds, police officials said.
The wounded 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 contains 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 southwest of 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.
When he appeared before the National Assembly on Tuesday, Dr. Jaafari said 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," Dr. Jaafari 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 promoted the right of the Kurds to govern Kirkuk.
Joost R. Hiltermann, director 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 administer 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.
Correction: June 22, 2005, Wednesday
A front-page article last Wednesday about a suicide bomb attack in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq riven by political and sectarian tensions, misstated the view of a conflict-resolution specialist on who should govern the city. The specialist, Joost R. Hiltermann, director of the Middle East office of the International Crisis Group, said the White House should ensure that Kirkuk has administrative autonomy, not that the central Iraq government should run it.
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Citation: Edward Wong, "Suicide Bomber Kills 22 in Attack at an Iraq Bank," New York Times, 15 June 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/middleeast/15iraq.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print
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