A suicide car bombing followed by an assault by grenade-throwing gunmen on a police headquarters in a disputed city in north Iraq killed 30 people yesterday.
The vehicle that was detonated in central Kirkuk was painted to appear as though it was a police car, and the militants who sought to seize the compound were dressed as policemen, witnesses said.
The attack shattered a relative calm in recent days in Iraq, which has been grappling with a political crisis pitting Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki against his erstwhile government partners amid weeks of ongoing protests calling for him to resign, less than three months before key provincial elections.
Photo: Reuters
No organization immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but Sunni militants including al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq frequently target security forces and government targets in a bid to destabilize the country and push it back toward the sectarian bloodshed that blighted it from 2005 to 2008.
The initial suicide car bomb was set off during morning rush hour, and was quickly followed by three gunmen dressed in police uniforms, armed with hand grenades and suicide vests, bursting through the main gate of the Kirkuk police compound in the direction of the headquarters building.
They threw multiple grenades as they sought to reach the building, but were killed before they could get there, witnesses said.
“I saw a vehicle stop at the checkpoint at the main entrance, and the police started checking it,” said Kosrat Hassan Karim, who was nearby when the attack took place. “Suddenly, a loud explosion happened, it was terrifying. I saw many people killed inside their cars — I have never seen such a big explosion in my life.”
Brigadier General Natah Mohammed Sabr, the head of Kirkuk city’s emergency services department, put the toll at 30 dead and 70 wounded.
In addition to the casualties, the attack caused massive damage to nearby buildings and shops, according to a journalist at the scene.
The massive explosion also killed people in nearby buildings. Mohammed Aziz, who works in an office building adjacent to the police headquarters, said at least two of his colleagues died in the blast.
Police largely cut off traffic in the center of the city and evacuated offices and businesses in the area. They managed to defuse one of the attackers’ suicide vests, but were still working to disarm the other two.
Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city 240km north of Baghdad, lies at the heart of a swathe of disputed territory claimed by both the central government and Iraq’s autonomous northern Kurdish region.
The unresolved row is persistently cited by diplomats and officials as the biggest threat to Iraq’s long-term stability.
Militants often exploit a lack of coordination between the two sides’ security forces and launch deadly attacks in the city, which remains one of the most violent in Iraq, and also in nearby towns.
The violence was the latest in a spike in unrest that comes amid the political tension — 246 people were killed last month, the most since September last year, according to a tally based on reports from security and medical officials.
Attacks are dramatically lower across Iraq since their peak in 2006 and 2007, but bombings and shootings remain common.
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
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.