A suicide truck bomber ripped the heart out of a northern Iraqi village yesterday, killing at least 105 people and demolishing dozens of homes and shops, police and medics said.
Ambulances and private cars ferried dozens of bloodied corpses and wounded civilians to clinics in the nearby town of Tuz Khurmatu and the provincial capital Kirkuk, where desperate relatives waited for news of the missing.
Officials were stunned by the scale of the blast, which devastated the main market in Emerli, a small rural community of people from Iraq's Shiite Turkmen minority living in an area notorious for al-Qaeda militants.
"I heard the cries of my child, then I heard nothing else until I woke in hospital," sobbed middle-aged housewife Sukaina Abdul Razak, whose clay brick home collapsed when the blast ripped through the village.
"I don't know the fate of my husband and my family. They were all in the kitchen, but I was in my room," she said, as she was treated for head injuries in Kirkuk's overcrowded emergency room.
Shrapnel from the blast killed shoppers hundreds of meters from its epicenter, wounded grocer Hussein Abu Al-Hussein Akbar Aziz said in Kirkuk.
"We have never seen an attack like that in Emerli. The whole village was shrouded in smoke and dust," he said, grimacing from a leg injury. "I was serving a woman and her child in my shop. They were both killed."
Lieutenant Colonel Saman Hamid, commander of the security coordination center in nearby Tuz Khurmatu, said: "105 Iraqis were killed and five are missing, we have registered their names. There are more than 250 wounded."
The casualty toll was confirmed by Wissam Abdullah, director of the main local hospital, who said the wounded had been taken to at least six emergency rooms up to 100km away around the the region.
The chief local civilian administrator, Hamad Rasheed, said he had seen reports that up to 125 people could be confirmed dead after rescuers finish digging through the rubble of dozens of buildings.
"The security reports that I have received from the scene confirm that 115 were killed, five are missing and around five more were collected as loose flesh. Some 40 homes, 20 shops and 10 vehicles were destroyed," Rasheed said.
"The corpses were under the debris of the collapsed buildings. Some were burnt and others were torn apart. This is a big disaster for the town, all of the casualties were civilians," he said.
Abdullah said the dead and wounded had been brought to the emergency room at his hospital in Tuz Khurmatu, to two hospitals in the provincial capital Kirkuk and two more as far away as the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.
The attack was the deadliest to hit Iraq since since April 18, when 190 people were killed in a spate of car bombings against Shiite districts of Baghdad.
Police Captain Nuzad Abdallah said the early morning attack occurred when the market was crowded with people. Three children were brought alive out of the debris but died before they could be taken for medical treatment.
Another car bomb attack against a military checkpoint in Baghdad killed at least three people and wounded 10, medics at the city's Ibn Nafees hospital said. A defense official said up to six people could have been killed.
The bombings came as the US military announced the deaths of eight soldiers over the previous two days and the British of two, and against a backdrop of mounting domestic opposition to the international troop presence.
Iraq is in the grip of several overlapping conflicts between religious and political factions, but the suicide car bomb is a hallmark of Sunni extremists such as those affiliated with al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Sunna.
The attacks appear designed to foment sectarian and ethnic violence and undermine Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government, which is working with US forces to quell the fighting.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion