A suicide truck bomb ripped through the Interior Ministry in the relatively peaceful Kurdish city of Irbil on Wednesday morning, killing at least 19 people and wounding 80, officials said. Kurdish officials blamed al-Qaida linked insurgents for the devastating attack.The attack came just as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Baghdad for an unannounced visit that was to include meetings with top Iraqi government officials, leaders of influential Iraqi factions and the senior U.S. military commander here. Cheney's visit was aimed at encouraging rival Iraqi factions to work together to overcome their divisions to work together to end the conflict.
The explosion in Irbil, 350 kilometers (217 miles) north of Baghdad, underscored how even relatively safe areas of the country were not immune from the violence. Irbil, the capital of the Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, had been spared much of the violence wracking the rest of Iraq.
The Interior Ministry building was badly damaged. Kurdish television showed rubble laying in piles and twisted metal beams. Rescue workers reached into the wreckage to pull out one of the victims of the blast. Windows were blown out down the street and wreckage was scattered nearly 100 meters (yards) away. The nearby security headquarters was also damaged.
Zariyan Othman, the Kurdish health minister, said 19 people were killed and 80 were wounded, including five who were in serious condition. Hamza Ahmed, a spokesman for the Irbil governor's office, said the dead and wounded included police and civilians.
Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman blamed the attack on Ansar al-Sunnah, a Sunni Arab insurgent group, and Ansar al-Islam, a mostly Kurdish militant group with ties to al-Qaida in Iraq. Ansar al-Islam has been blamed for a number of attacks, including attempts to assassinate Kurdish officials.
Othman said authorities learned that insurgents were planning a large attack a week ago when police arrested a militant cell in the town of Sulaimaniyah. "During questioning they confessed that were getting training lessons in a neighboring country and that was Iran," he said.
It's past time to let the Kurds and the Shiia fix the Sunni 'insurection' problem. It won't be pretty, but it will bring a final resolution. All the USA has to do is guarantee Iraq's borders, so the Kurds in particular don't have to watch their backs while they are clearing the Sunnis into the Western desert. And I'll note, a Sunni population geographically contained essentially fixes the Iraq problem.