Bombers kill women teachers in blitz on Iraq oil hub

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Media: AFP
Byline: n/a
Date:15 October

KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) - Insurgent car bombers have blitzed the Iraqi oil city
of Kirkuk, killing 14 people and wounding 72 in seven brutal attacks,
including one on a school training young women teachers.

Brigadier General Adel Ibrahim of the Kirkuk police said three of the blasts
were triggered by suicide car bombers, one was a booby-trapped car and
another a makeshift bomb planted in a residential neighbourhood.

In one of the attacks, a bomber detonated a car laden with explosives in
front of a school which trains young women aged between 16 and 21 to become
teachers, killing two of the students and wounding 25 more, he said Sunday.

"A suicide bomber blew himself up as the girls were leaving the school. Two
of them were completely burned in the flames," the brigadier told AFP.

Attacks on female professionals are becoming common in Iraq, where some
ultraconservative Islamists are attempting to bomb working women back into
their homes and freeze them out of public life.
A burned four-wheel drive vehicle, which was hit a roadside bomb, is seen on
a road in central Baghdad.
CAFP - Ahamd Al-Rubaye

Another suicide attack killed five members of an Iraqi armed security detail
set up to protect goverment offices, and a third ripped through a crowded
street market.

Kirkuk's police chief, Major General Torhan Yussef, told AFP that a total of
14 people were killed and 72 wounded in the wave of explosions.

"The evening curfew has been brought forward by two hours," he said.

The blitz came just a week after Iraqi troops carried out a major security
operation in the divided oil city, imposing a curfew and launching house
searches in an apparently unsuccessful a bid to root out militants.

Yussef, however, insisted that the attacks showed that the insurgents were
becoming desperate because of progress being made under the security plan.

Leaders of Iraq's Kurdish minority want Kirkuk and its rich oilfields to
become part of northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, an idea fiercely
opposed by the city's Arab and Turkmen communities.

Ousted dictator Saddam Hussein altered the city's ethnic make-up by driving
out Kurds and pursuing a policy of forced Arabisation. Since his fall in
2003 there have been tensions between returning Kurds and the new residents.
An Iraqi security personnel secures the scene where two bombs tore through
the convoy of a high-ranking security official
CAFP - WISAM SAMI

A referendum will decide the city's political fate next year, but in the
meantime it has become the target of Sunni Arab extremists opposed both to
Kurdish ambitions and Iraq's embattled US-backed government.

Meanwhile, violence continued elsewhere in the country, including in the
war-torn capital, which is in the grip of a savage wave of sectarian
violence with rival Shiite and Sunni death squads competing to slaughter
civilians.

The US military also announced the deaths of three US soldiers in south
Baghdad when a roadside bomb destroyed their vehicle on Saturday, bringing
the number of Americans killed in the first two weeks of the month to 50.

Their deaths bring to 2,759 the number of US servicemen killed in action or
from other causes in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP
count based on Pentagon figures.

In Baghdad, bombers targeted a convoy carrying Hala Mohammed Shakr, head of
the interior ministry's financial affairs department, killing two bodyguards
and five civilian bystanders, Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said.

The capital's Al-Kindi hospital reported receiving eight wounded civilians.
The photograph of a woman lays on a pool of oil
CAFP - Wisam Sami

Elsewhere in the city, a bomb exploded next to a passing convoy of security
contractors, setting a vehicle ablaze and killing two bystanders, police
said.

The blast on Ghadir Street in southeast Baghdad also wounded five people.

Another bomb killed one person and wounded two in the Amil neighborhood, a
confessionally mixed area of southwest Baghdad that has seen a number of
attacks.

South of the capital, a policeman and a civilian were killed in separate
incidents near the city of Kut. Two bodies partially eaten by fish were
pulled out of the Tigris river downstream of the capital near the town of
Suweira.
 
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