Posted on 05/13/2007 7:56:32 AM PDT by ASC2006
Up to 50 people were killed and 115 others injured in a suicide truck bomb attack on a Kurdish party headquarters in the northern Iraqi town of Makhmour on Sunday, Kurdish senior official said.
"Our latest report said that 50 people were killed and 115 others injured, some of them are in critical conditions," Ziyan Uthman, Health Minister of the Kurdish autonomous government told Xinhua by telephone.
A suicide bomber driving an explosive-laden truck struck the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Makhmour town during a meeting in the building, according to a local police source.
Uthman said that six policemen were among the killed, including Brigadier Salim al-Jubouri, head of the police station in the nearby Nimrod town, and the mayor of Makhmour town was also wounded in the attack.
The blast badly damaged the headquarters building along with nearby local government and police station buildings and dozens of vehicles in the town, 100 km southeast of Mosul City, the Kurdish official said.
Police and rescue teams are still removing debris in a bid to look for more victims, Uthman added.
Sunday's attack was the second deadly attack of this month in the Kurdish region, where witnessed another suicide truck bombing in the city of Arbil, some 350 km north of Baghdad. A total of 20 people killed and 70 others wounded in the truck attack on the building of the Kurdish regional interior ministry in Arbil.
(Excerpt) Read more at chinadaily.com.cn ...
Inside Job!
An extension of the Al Quida campaign to make the surge appear to be ineffective, it is almost impossible to stop a suicide bomber in a heretofor peaceful area. That is just a fact of life.
Let’s wish the survivors well.
We’re in the middle of ‘surging’ US and Iraqi units (some from the Kurdish area) into the Baghdad area, does this really surprise anyone? What’s next, ‘surge’ units to the north?
I really wish 60 minutes hadn’t broadcast that piece about how peaceful and prosperous that area of Iraq has become. It was like painting a target on it for Iran/Al Queada.
Not even established security forces like that of Jordan, Egypt, or even the UK are all that good at stopping suicide bombers leadpenny.
al-Qaeda has a weapon that even a police state like pre-war Iraq would have problems dealing with.
Probably true, but is there any doubt that the increased emphasis on Baghdad is giving AQ, or whoever, the opportunity to thumb there noses at the ‘surge’ strategy?
The only violence capable of destorying Iraq is Sunni on Shia violence.
Zarqawi knew that quite well as he laid out in his letter to Bin Laden. al-Qaeda spending resources on killing Sunnis in Ramadi and Fallujah as well as Kurdistan with suicide bombers as they have been doing of late doesn’t destory the fabric of Iraqi society the way al-Qaeda attacking Shia does.
That is because the average Shia blames all Sunnis for the attack. The al-Qaeda chemical attacks reciently on Sunnis in Ramadi had the opposite effect of what al-Qaeda wanted. It pissed off Sunnis and help make many Shia realize the Sunni community itself is not at war with us.
I meant to say Sunni on Shia and Shia on Sunni violence.
Suicide bombings are not individual crimes; they are group crimes. When somebody does a suicide bombing against you, you have to bomb his village, and if you aren't mean enough to do that, you should not be there.
All such tactics rest on an underlying assumption, i.e. that the victims is more civilized than the perpetrator. Take that assumption away, and the tactic falls flat. You will search the history books in vain for any reference to anybody using terrorist tactics against Chengis Khan for instance.
Let’s see how the Kurdish peoples react. I think they are pretty capable of taking matters into their own hands when it comes to “outside” troublemakers ruining the relative peace and order in that part of Iraq. I think they will root out these aq’s and dispatch with them in short order.
That's exactly right. Someday the U.S. may eventually apologize to Saddam Hussein for calling his brutally repressive tactics "criminal."
An honest, objective assessment of the situation would likely identify the 1982 destruction of the village of Hama by the Syrian government as the most effective "counter-insurgency" campaign in modern history.
Sad, but probably true.
Saddam put down the Kurdish rebellion in the late 80s quickly and efficently using incredible violence. Say what you will about Saddam or Assad’s methods. There is a reason why they stayed in power.
The same people demanding we wipe Iraqi cities off the map need to look in the mirror because that is exactly what Saddam would have done.
Where do you get the parenthetic addition to the title? I saw no reference to al-Qaeda in the article.
The article makes a not unimportant mistake!
Makhmour is NOT under Kurdish Regional Administration.
This is clearly the work of Al-Qaeda, specifically Ansar al-Islam (who has ethnic Kurdish members). Arabic terrorists would have an harder time moving around within Kurdish populated areas. The pattern and the target scream Al-Qaeda or affiliate. Who else?
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