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Attack in kurdish area kills 45 police applicants { May 4 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050400429.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050400429.html
At Least 45 Iraqis Killed in Bomb Attack
By Marwan Ani, Caryle Murphy and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 4, 2005; 6:45 AM
IRBIL, May 4 -- A suicide bomber wearing explosives joined a line of police force applicants in the Kurdish town of Irbil Wednesday and blew himself up, killing at least 45 and wounding 160 others, according to the Iraqi Defense Ministry and Kurdish officials.
The attack increased the death toll to more than 185 in just the past week of violence.
Separately, the U.S. military announced Wednesday that two soldiers died Tuesday when their vehicles were struck by roadside bombs in Baghdad.
About 15 American troops have been killed since May 1.
The reinvigorated insurgency comes just as the new Iraqi government is getting organized, some three months after the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Military officials have speculated that the attacks are timed to coincide with that development.
There had appeared to be a lull after the election, featuring smaller-scale attacks killing eight or nine people, until a few weeks ago, when the insurgents appeared once again to be aiming at mass killing, staging attacks amid larger crowds in busy streets and marketplaces.
On April 30, a suicide car bomber drove into a gathering of mourners at a funeral for a slain political leader in northern Iraq, killing 25 people and wounding at least 30.
The Irbil bombing occurred shortly after 9:00 a.m. local time (1:00 a.m. EDT) outside an office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which also serves as a police recruiting office in Irbil, which lies more than 200 miles north of Baghdad in the center of Iraq's Kurdish-populated north.
Local hospital officials in Irbil put the initial death toll higher, saying that 60 had been killed.
The attacker slipped in with the young men lined up on the sidewalk outside the KDP office, many of them responding to advertisements on Kurdish television in recent days soliciting recruits for the local police force.
The concrete barriers and street outside the KDP office were stained with blood and many of the burned bodies were unrecognizable.
KDP official Kamal Karkukli said the large number of dead and extensive damage to buildings led officials to first think that the blast had come from a car bomb. But further investigations, Karkukli said, confirmed that the bomber was on foot and wearing an explosive belt underneath traditional Kurdish dress.
Irbil went on high security alert, with police and the Kurdish militia known as pesh merga patrolling the streets of the city and manning checkpoints at city entrances.
Government employees were sent home and local officials appealed to citizens for information that might lead to arrests in the case. University students left classes to give blood at local hospitals.
The attack is the worst in over a year in the relatively peaceful Kurdish north. It could intensify sectarian tensions between Kurds and Arabs because the insurgency in Iraq is predominantly Sunni Arab.
"May God get revenge from the Arabs," screamed a grief-stricken Kurdish woman who smeared her hands with blood from the ground and then spread it across her face and hair.
Identifying herself only as Umm Nawzad, she said her son was among the victims and added, "If we were not poor, my son would not have gone to apply for the police."
The Iraqi Defense Ministry issued a statement saying that 45 were killed and more than 160 wounded in the attack. U.S. military spokesman Capt. Mark H. Walter, reporting from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, said that initial reports indicated that at least 50 were killed.
Murphy reported from Baghdad. Barbash reported from Washington.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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