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Insurgents have detonated a car bomb in a protected enclave housing the US and British consulates in Iraq's oil city of Kirkuk in the latest in a string of deadly blasts, security sources said.
Source:
AFP
31 Jul 2006 - 12:00 AM  UPDATED 24 Feb 2015 - 3:08 PM

City leaders described the two-month-old bombing campaign as the work of Islamist extremists bent on terrorising the population and fomenting civil strife in the ethnically and religiously mixed city.

The blast, which killed two and wounded six, came overnight beside a row of shops in the previously untouched Arafa Naftiya area, a predominantly Christian neighborhood containing the headquarters of the Northern Oil Company and foreign consulates.

Since June, Kirkuk has been hit by a series of bomb attacks, killing dozens of civilians at gas stations, in city markets and, most dramatically, in front of the courthouse where 22 people were killed on June 23.

On Saturday, six were killed and 17 wounded by a car bomb near a gas station.

Kirkuk police chief Major General Shirku Shakr Hakim told AFP the Sunni extremist Ansar al-Sunna and Al-Qaeda in Iraq organizations are believed to be mainly responsible for the attacks.

"Kirkuk is being targeted because of its oil and its mix of ethnicities and religions that have been living in peace for dozens of years," he said.

The northern city is a fragile mix of Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Turkmen, Shiites and Christians, who for the most part have found ways of resolving their differences through an ethnically and confessionally mixed provincial council.

In other violence around the country:

  • A police patrol in Hilla, 120 kilometres south of Baghdad, was targeted by a roadside bomb that killed two civilians and wounded 10 others.
  • A suicide car bomber attacked a police patrol in the northern city of Mosul, killing one and wounding three.
  • British forces killed two gunmen and wounded another after a supply convoy in southern Iraq came under attack southwest of Al-Amara, a spokesman said.
  • The US military says a US plane launched an air strike against a building south-west of Baghdad, which was used by al-Qaeda to stage mortar attacks on civilians, killing two militants.
  • One policeman was killed and a civilian injured when a bomb exploded near a police patrol in Baqouba, police said.
  • The US military said four US marines were killed in combat in Iraq's western province of Anbar.

    In other news:

  • Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has warned television stations against broadcasting footage that could undermine the country's stability.

    A statement by the prime minister's office cited news reports that "capitalise on the footage of victims of terrorist attacks".

    He called on media outlets to "respect the dignity of human beings and not to fall in the trap set up by terrorist groups who want to petrify the Iraqi people".

    The statement said television stations should uphold the code of media ethics or else the government will take legal action against them.

    The statement did not elaborate, but it fell short of Mr Maliki's earlier warning that he will not hesitate to "shut them down if they do not stop inciting sectarianism".

  • A former US soldier accused of raping and murdering an Iraqi girl compared killing people in Iraq to "squashing an ant," in an interview with a reporter about a month before the attack.

    Steven Green, 21, a former private with the 101st Airborne Division, is under arrest in Kentucky and could face the death penalty if convicted of the March 12 murders of the Iraqi girl and three of her relatives.

    Writing in Sunday's editions of The Washington Post, Andrew Tilghman, a former correspondent for the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes, said he interviewed Green several times in February at his unit south of Baghdad.

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