Iraqis hunt for relatives in rubble

IRAQ: Residents of the town hit by Iraq’s bloodiest attack in 16 months searched for their loved ones after a massive truck bombing killed 72 people and destroyed dozens of houses.

Saturday’s attack in the predominantly Shiite Turkmen town of Taza Kharmatu, 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, was the latest bloody bombing in the runup to the planned pullout of US troops from Iraqi towns and cities.

As rescue efforts continued, Iraqi officials announced that insurgents had killed nine police over the past two days in the two most populous cities of Baghdad and Mosul and that two people were killed when a bomb exploded near a restaurant in the capital’s southeast on Sunday evening.

“The toll from the explosion in Taza is 72 dead,” said Sarhad Qadir, the top policeman for Kirkuk’s outskirts, who added that more than 200 people had been wounded.

Iraqi emergency services and US soldiers helped residents sift through the rubble in their quest to find survivors of about 80 houses levelled by the blast. The International Committee of the Red Cross sent a tonne of medical equipment to Kirkuk hospital, the agency’s Iraq spokeswoman Dibeh Fakhr said, while the US military said it had contributed generator lights and water to the rescue effort.

“Most of the victims were children, the elderly or women, who all represent easy targets for terrorists,” provincial governor Abdel Rahman Mustafa told AFP. “They want to plant the seeds of sectarian division among the Iraqi people.”

Taza, Monday, AFP