Three Iraqis die in suicide attack

A SUICIDE car bomber struck the US intelligence headquarters in Irbil yesterday killing three Iraqis.

The dead included a 12-year-old boy, a Kurdish security official said yesterday. The US military in Baghdad said the bombing wounded four “defence human intelligence service” officers and a Kurdish Peshmerga guard at the building.

The Kurdish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said three of the wounded Americans suffered serious abdominal injuries from flying glass and were airlifted by helicopter to a US military hospital. The official said the attack was the work of al-Qaida. He gave no reason for that assessment, but said he was certain Osama bin Laden’s organisation was behind the attack.

Forty-one Iraqis were hurt in the bombing, which destroyed several homes in the neighbourhood.

In west Baghdad, a US soldier from the 1st Armoured Division was killed yesterday trying to detonate a roadside bomb, the military said. The victim was part of a team that tried to blow up the bomb by shooting it with a machinegun on a Bradley fighting vehicle. The bomb did not explode when fired at, but blew up as the soldier went to inspect it.

His death was the second in as many days among American troops after an eight-day stretch when no Americans were reported to have died.

Meanwhile, for the third time in two weeks, anti-tank rockets were fired at, but missed, the headquarters of Denmark’s 400-man military contingent in southern Iraq.

On Tuesday, Iraq’s acting president said that Turkey should send as many as 10,000 peacekeeping troops under a UN mandate, providing they are deployed in the far west of the country away from Kurdish territory.

The invitation contradicts Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s new foreign minister and a member of the Kurdish minority, who has said neighbouring countries should not send peacekeepers.