Suicide fuel truck bomber kills eight civilians
Eight Iraqi civilians were killed and four others were wounded when a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden fuel tanker was fatally shot by police and his truck blew up near police headquarters in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, police said today.
Immediately after the Saturday afternoon explosion which damaged at least 10 homes, about 20 vehicles with at least 60 gunmen drove up to the site and clashed with the police, according to a police official.
Most of the nearby homes that were damaged in the blast were empty, said the official.
At least three police officers were wounded in the ensuing fighting, which ended after US military helicopters flew overhead, according to police.
A US military official in the area said the gunmen were armed with rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. The official credited Iraqi police with preventing further casualties.
Samarra lies in the heartland of the Sunni-led al-Qaida insurgency and was the scene of the February 2006 bombing that destroyed the golden dome of a famous Shiite shrine there. The bombing set in motion relentless bloodletting along Iraq’s sectarian fault line that has threatened to divide the country.
The issue of sectarian divisions was raised on Saturday, when the son and heir apparent of the country’s top Shiite politician spoke strongly in favour of autonomy for Iraq’s religiously and ethnically divided regions.
Ammar al-Hakim, who is being groomed to take over the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest Shiite party here, has been a firm supporter of federalism from the outset. But his blunt language Saturday appeared to signal growing impatience with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s failure to reconcile the fractured groups.
Addressing hundreds of supporters at the party’s Baghdad headquarters, al-Hakim called on Iraqis to press ahead with the creation of self-rule regions, but cautioned that the country’s unity must be safeguarded.
“Federalism is one way to accomplish this goal,” he said.
He said Baghdad’s monopoly of power over decision-making and national wealth had turned the central government into a “tyrannical and dominating” body.
The idea of breaking up Iraq into self-rule entities has gained traction in Washington after two US senators, Democrat Joseph Biden and Republican Sam Brownback, proposed giving more control to ethnically and religiously divided regions.
A nonbinding resolution to that effect won Senate approval last month, but Republicans supported it only after the measure was amended to make clear that US President George Bush should press for a new federalised system only if the Iraqis wanted it.
Maliki and other Iraqi politicians denounced the decision as an infringement on Iraq’s sovereignty. But President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd and firm proponent of federalism, praised the resolution, saying it cemented Iraq’s unity and opposed its break-up.
Security remains the main concern in Iraq, more than four years after the US invasion, but the question of federalism is potentially explosive and could deepen the sectarian divide.
Iraq’s once-dominant Sunni Arabs fear that it would lead to the country’s break-up into a Shiite south and a Kurdish north, both with considerable oil wealth, leaving Sunnis the resource-poor central region. They see the creation of an autonomous region in the south as a scheme engineered by Shiite, non-Arab Iran to gain a permanent foothold in Iraq.
But not all of Iraq’s majority Shiites back autonomy.
The Sadrists, a parliamentary bloc loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, are flatly opposed to it, while others, like Maliki’s Dawa Party, warn that federalism could deepen Iraq’s security and sectarian woes if implemented soon.
