A suicide truck bomber hit a residential area of a Kurdish village in northern Iraq before dawn yesterday, killing at least 19 people and injuring 30 others, officials said, in what appeared to be the latest in a string of ethnic attacks in the region.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, but it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents who remain active in Mosul.
A police officer and health official in Mosul said the bomb went off around 12:30am in the village of Wardek, about 55km southeast of the city — a region where US commanders have warned that insurgents appear to be trying to stoke an Arab-Kurdish conflict.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
The blast took down a number of houses and the casualty toll was expected to rise because many people were still missing in the rubble, the officials said.
Local security forces intercepted a second suicide truck bomber, killing the driver and defusing the bomb before it could be detonated, they said.
Insurgents in northern Iraq, who have maintained a stronghold in the city of Mosul, have frequently targeted remote villages and towns that depend on small security forces for protection.
The violence that continues to plague Iraq’s north and the capital has forced the government in Baghdad to acknowledge gaps in security.
US and Iraqi officials have identified the split between Iraq’s majority Arabs and the Kurdish minority as a greater long-term threat to Iraq’s stability than the Sunni-Shiite conflict.
At the heart of the dispute is the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, as well as villages in Ninevah Province such as Wardek that the Kurds want to incorporate into their semiautonomous region despite opposition from Arabs and the minority Turkomen ethnic group.
After a series of horrific bombings last month, US General Ray Odierno proposed deploying US soldiers alongside Iraqi and Kurdish troops to patrol the areas.
At the time, Odierno warned that al-Qaeda in Iraq was exploiting tensions between the Iraqi army and the Kurdish militia to carry out attacks. He said al-Qaeda was targeting minorities, small towns that don’t have a police force. No decision has yet been announced on the suggestion of joint patrols.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia