Iraq blast claims 85; gunmen slay 29

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber in the volatile northern city of Kirkuk on Monday crashed his truck into a compound that includes offices of a major Kurdish political party, killing 85 people. Many victims were women and children, shopping in the busy market next to the political offices, who were engulfed by a large fireball.

It was the latest attack to stoke fears that intensified U.S. military operations in Baghdad may have led insurgents to move their operations to more vulnerable locations. The explosion flung bodies throughout the outdoor market and left some of the 185 people who were wounded shouting for help as they ran through the streets with their clothes and hair on fire, witnesses said.

A security official in Diyala reported another attack, in a village north of Baqouba, in which he said men dressed in Iraqi military uniforms and driving civilian vehicles shot and killed 29 people. The official, Col. Ragheb Radhi al-Umiri, said that gunmen surrounded the victims and fired into the crowd, and that the victims included men, women and children. No other information was available, and a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said he was unaware of the report.

In the Kirkuk blast, a senior local police official said 9,000 pounds of explosives were used, gouging a crater into the ground several yards deep while destroying buildings and scores of shops and cars. One of the buildings, the police said, belonged to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that controls southeastern Kurdistan and whose leader is the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani. There was no report on casualties among party members.

Sherzad Abdullah was a few hundred yards away when, he said, he saw the truck ram into the perimeter of the compound and explode. Stunned and slightly wounded, Abdullah said he watched the fireball "devour the cars passing on the road."

One passenger bus burst into flames. "The whole bus was on fire," he said, "and the passengers were jumping up and down inside."

It was the single deadliest post-invasion blast in Kirkuk, a city rich in both oil and ethnicity. Ambitious and organized Kurds are pushing to absorb the city into the neighboring Iraqi Kurdish region, while Turkmen and Arabs are trying to prevent a full-scale Kurdish takeover.

The enormous payload was very similar to the July 7 attack in Amerli, a poor Shiite Turkmen village 50 miles south of Kirkuk, that obliterated dozens of families, who were crushed as their fragile clay-walled homes collapsed on top of them.