Iraq suicide bombings kill 16

Three suicide car bombings killed 16 people in northern Iraq today, including a top municipal council leader plus a bodyguard of Iraq’s Kurdish deputy prime minister, police said.

Continuing violence during the past days has also claimed the lives of three children, a US soldier and a Sunni Muslim cleric, underscoring the rampant, random nature of an insurgency that has killed more than 780 people since the April 28 announcement of Iraq’s new Shiite-led government.

At least 10 people were killed and 40 wounded in a massive explosion targeting a restaurant at 8am local time (5am Irish time) in Tuz Khormato, 55 miles south of the northern oil city of Kirkuk, said police Lieutenant Sabah Hidayat.

The bombing targeted the town’s Baghdad Restaurant, where bodyguards of Iraq’s Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, were eating, said police said police Brigadier Sarhad Qadre.

“I was sitting inside my restaurant when about six cars parked nearby and their passengers came inside and ordered food,” said restaurant owner Ahmed al-Dawoudi.

“Seconds later, I heard a big explosion and the restaurant was turned into twisted wreckage and rubble. Blood and pieces of flesh were everywhere.”

Shaways was not at the restaurant at the time of the blast, which killed 10 diners, including one his guards. At least 40 were wounded, including six of the bodyguards.

Kurds, who want oil-rich Kirkuk to be part of their autonomous Kurdistan region, have been regularly targeted by insurgent attacks.

The blast set ablaze eight cars in the restaurant’s car park, the focal point of a bloody, rubble-strewn scene that US and Iraqi police quickly cordoned off.

Shards of glass, shoes and splattered breakfast meals covered the restaurant’s floor as emergency workers raced around overturned tables and wooden chairs in a bid to treat the casualties.

“The suicide bomber detonated his car outside Baghdad Restaurant where the bodyguards stopped for a while to eat breakfast while heading to (the northern city of) Sulaimaniyah from Baghdad,” said Colonel Abbas Mohamed Amin, chief of Tuz Khormato police.

Amin said the car used in the attack was a white Toyota sedan and believes the bomber followed the guards from Baghdad.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a suicide car bomber apparently targeting two US consulate vehicles killed two Iraqi bystanders and wounded eight others today, Brigadier Qadre said. The explosion, which happened at 8.30am local time (5.30am Irish time), did not damage the American vehicles.

Further south in Baqouba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, another suicide bomber killed four people, including Hussein Alwan al-Tamimi, deputy head of Iraq’s northeastern Diyala provincial council, police Colonel Mudhafar Mohammed said.

A US soldier assigned to the Marines was killed yesterday when a roadside bomb struck the vehicle he was travelling in near the volatile western Iraqi city of Ramadi, the military announced today.

As of today, at least 1,664 US military members have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

A Sunni cleric, Imad al-Hayali, was “mistakenly” killed by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint in Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, police Lieutenant Adnan Abdullah said today. Al-Hayali was shot on Tuesday by soldiers who thought he was driving dangerously toward the checkpoint, Abdullah said.

A southern Baghdad mortar barrage yesterday killed 12-year-old Sabaa Haitham, her brother Sajjad, 10, their eight-year-old cousin Mina Mohammed Abid their uncle, Lu’ay Salih, in his mid-20s, hospital officials said.

In a bid to curb Iraq’s insurgency, Shiite leaders have started reaching out to Sunni Muslim insurgent groups believed responsible for multiple attacks.

Senior Shiite cleric Hummam Hammoudi, chairman of a committee named by the National Assembly to draw up Iraq’s constitution, said the Shiite-led government has opened indirect communications with factions in the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency and is trying to persuade them to lay down their arms.

“Some informal and limited contacts have been established with parties that we label as ‘resistance,’ so they can contribute to the drafting of the constitution,” said Hammoudi, a senior member of Iraq’s largest Shiite political party.

Experts have long maintained it will be difficult to defeat the insurgency with military means alone.

They stress the need for Sunni Arab participation in the political system, adequate reconstruction funds and job creation as key to weakening support for the rebels.

But the contacts did not include radical Islamic groups such as terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, which has been blamed for some of the worst bombings, kidnappings and other attacks.