155 Die in ‘quiet’ Kurdish Kirkuk Region [Updated]

155 Killed in North Iraq as Blast hits Shi’ite village Armili (Tuz Khormato)

Shattering a relative lull in Iraq’s violence, the attacks raised questions about whether insurgents who have fled an ongoing military offensive in Baghdad and Diyala Province are regrouping and assaulting soft targets elsewhere, in less-secure areas with fewer troops.

The worst carnage occurred in the Shi’ite Turkmen village of Armili, 50 miles south of Kirkuk, when a suicide bomber detonated a food truck laden with explosives in the central market at 9:30 a.m.

Police and provincial officials put the Armili death toll at 115 but said they expected the number to rise. Colonel Abbas Mohammed Amin, the police commander of Tuz Khormato district, where the village is located, said 155 were killed, including 25 children and 40 women. About 250 were wounded, he said.

Armili is a town of 26,000 people, mostly Shi’ites from Iraq’s Turkman ethnic minority. Residents say tensions are constantly high with Sunni Arabs who dominate the surrounding villages.

The US military has said Sunni extremists have been fleeing the three-week-old US offensive centered at the city of Baqubah, which is 60 miles to the south near Baghdad. The sweep aims to uproot Al Qaeda militants and Sunni insurgents using the area to stage car bomb attacks in the capital.

Iraqis inspect destruction at the site of a truck bomb blast in the village of Ermeli near the oil rich city of Kirkuk, northern Iraq. The darkness of grief gripped the Iraqi village of Ermeli as black mourning banners, armbands, bloodstains and soot bore grim testament to a truck bomb attack. (AFP)

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KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) – At least 22 people were killed when an attacker detonated a suicide truck bomb in a northern Iraqi village market, bringing down nearby houses, a police commander said.

Lieutenant Colonel Hussein Ali Rasheed, deputy chief of police in the northern town of Tuz Khurmatu, said the blast had devastated the heart of Emerli, a small community from Iraq’s Shiite Turkoman minority.

“There are around 40 wounded. Some of the houses collapsed on people, and more may be trapped inside,” another officer, captain Nuzad Abdallah, told AFP.

TUZ KHORMATO, Iraq – Suicide bombings killed nearly 50 people and wounded dozens in two Shiite villages north of Baghdad, including a large truck explosion Saturday that ripped through an outdoor market and buried victims in rubble.

The truck bombing ripped through a market in the village of Armili north of Baghdad, destroying mud-brick homes and setting cars on fire. Farmers’ pickup trucks took the dead and wounded to the nearest health facility, in Tuz Khormato, nearly 30 miles to the north, said Capt. Soran Ali of the Tuz Khormato police.

Saleh Ali, a medic at Tuz Khormato hospital, said 25 dead and 100 wounded were brought to the facility.

“Some are still under the rubble with no one to help them. There are no ambulances to evacuate the victims,” said Haitham Hadad, a resident who evacuated his wounded cousin in his car to to Tuz Khormato hospital. Dozens of weeping relatives of victims crowded the hospital, searching for loved ones.

At the market, “I saw destruction everywhere, dozens of cars destroyed, about 15 shops and many houses,” said Haitham Yalman, whose daughter and sister were wounded.

The night before, a suicide bomber detonated a boobytrapped car at a funeral in the Shiite Kurdish village of Zargosh, in the Sadiya region of Diyala province about 75 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said.

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The blasts suggested that Sunni militants are regrouping to launch their deadliest form of attack — suicide explosions, often against Shiites — in regions further away from Baghdad, beyond the edges of a three-week old U.S. offensive on the capital’s northern flank.

Since mid-June, U.S. forces have been waging an offensive in and around Baqouba, part of a stepped-up U.S. crackdown seeking to bring calm to the capital. It aims to uproot al-Qaida fighters and other Sunni insurgents who use the Baqouba region — and another part of Diyala province on Baghdad’s southestern edges — as a staging ground for attacks in the capital.

American commanders acknowledge many insurgent leaders fled Baqouba just ahead of the U.S. assault there.

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Six more American soldiers have been killed in action over two days in Iraq and a seventh died outside battle, the US military said in a series of statements.

In Baghdad, three soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed Friday in two roadside bomb attacks, one of them carried out with an Iranian-designed armour-piercing bomb. Six more soldiers were wounded.

Another soldier was killed on Thursday in a similar attack, and two marines were killed in western Iraq “while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province,” the statement said.