[Asharq al-Aswat] Car bombs destroyed the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Wednesday, killing seven and wounding up to 80 people in the heart of a region of long-simmering ethnic tensions.Three blasts struck outside the headquarters of the Kurdish intelligence forces known as the Asayish, on a highway and near a gas station in southern Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
located 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Storied Baghdad.
AP Television News footage showed police cars with blaring sirens racing to the Asayish headquarters with black and gray plumes of smoke rising from the first two attacks around 10 a.m. Minutes later, the third blast just down the street from the Asayish headquarters went
kaboom!near a taxicab and knocked people to the ground. The sounds of gunshots could be heard immediately after the last bombing.
Police Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said seven were killed and up to 80 maimed in the kabooms. Dr. Khalid Ahmed of Kirkuk emergency hospital confirmed the casualty count.
Qadir said the bomb along the highway targeted a police patrol led by a top commander, Col. Ahmed Shamerani, but he was not hurt in the blast. But two coppers were among the dead, while five police and eight Asayish officials were maimed.
"We had just passed the car boom -- it was less than 40 yards away," said policeman Meriwan Salih, whose arm was broken and who had shrapnel pierce his back when the third bomb went
kaboom!as his patrol sped by. "The huge blast threw me into the air."
Grocery owner Shakhwan Ahmed, 30, said one of the blasts shook his shop, sending fruit and boxes crashing to the ground.
"It was chaos -- horrified people were running," said Ahmed, lamenting the attack after what he said was a nearly six-month lull in violence in Kirkuk. "There is no indication that there will be long-standing security in Iraq; there is always a security problem here. And forces of Evil are now telling us that they are coming back."
Kirkuk is the epicenter of ethnic tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen. The city also sits on top of one-third of Iraq's estimated $11 trillion in oil reserves, and Arabs fear the Kurds want to annex Kirkuk to their northern autonomous region.