MUSLIM HATE FOR RETIREES
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
23 die in attack on bank
Retirees killed while waiting to collect pension payments. Nearly 100 injured.
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
BAGHDAD, IRAQ – A suicide bomber blew himself up Tuesday in a crowd of retirees lining up to receive their pensions in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing 23 people and injuring nearly 100 others, including women and children, police said.
The bombing took place at 10:30 a.m., as the retirees were waiting in front of Al Rafidain Bank, said Maj. Gen. Shirko Shakir Hakim, a police chief in the Kirkuk police force. The main hospital in Kirkuk overflowed for hours with victims, and those with minor wounds were ushered out to make room for the more serious cases.
"Enough with terrorism and killings," said an elderly woman, who sat sobbing on the street near the debris of the blast site. She said she did not know whether her son, who was selling children's toys near the bank, was alive. "We're tired, and we want God to help us just as he helped his prophets. I beseech him to help the Iraqi people to stop the bloodshed."
The attack, the deadliest in Kirkuk since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government, was the worst in a series of assaults on a particularly violent day here. Five Iraqi policemen were killed when a suicide car bomb rammed into a checkpoint in Kan'an, north of the capital, a police official in nearby Baqouba said. The U.S. military said a soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday, and two soldiers died from a roadside bomb explosion near the western provincial capital of Ramadi on Monday.
The 2nd Marine Division said Marines accidentally killed five civilians and wounded four others Tuesday after firing at two cars speeding toward a checkpoint near Ramadi. The cars had approached the checkpoint shortly after an insurgent had tried ramming into the checkpoint with a suicide car bomb, the Marines said in a written statement.
One of Baghdad's main hospitals reported that it received two groups of bodies Monday night totaling 24 people who apparently had been executed. Seventeen were Iraqi truck drivers who transport goods to companies in the capital, the Interior Ministry official said. The other seven were also believed to be working in convoys.
In a speech before the National Assembly on Tuesday, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite Arab prime minister, said the government was trying to solve the impasse over Kirkuk, but that it was difficult to balance the political demands of the city's Kurds and Arabs. Most of those killed in the bombing Tuesday were Kurds, police officials said.
Tens of thousands of Kurds who say they were displaced from Kirkuk during the rule of Saddam have moved back in droves and are threatening to force out the Arabs whom Saddam relocated there. At the same time, the Turkmens, an ethnic group originating in Central Asia, entertain notions of regaining political dominance of the city, which they held under the Ottoman Empire, when Turkish sultans appointed the Turkmens as their proxy rulers in the area.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have said they fear the violence in Kirkuk could increase as the various political parties in the National Assembly begin to negotiate over the constitution.