Kirkuk, Iraq – A suicide bomber struck outside a bank as elderly men and women waited to cash their pension checks Tuesday, killing 23 people and wounding nearly 100 in this oil-rich northern city that has become a flashpoint for sectarian tension.
Elsewhere, five Iraqi soldiers were killed and two wounded in a suicide car bombing at a checkpoint in Kanan, 30 miles north of Baghdad, and the bodies of 24 men – victims of recent insurgent ambushes in the west of the country – were transported to a hospital in the capital.
An American soldier was killed when a roadside bomb hit his convoy in southern Baghdad, the military said, adding that two other soldiers assigned to a Marine unit died in a similar attack Monday in Ramadi, 60 miles west of the capital.
The violence in Kirkuk was the worst to hit the ethnically mixed city, 180 miles north of Baghdad, since the war started in March 2003. The largest previous attack was the Sept. 4 suicide car bombing outside an Iraqi police academy in the city that killed 20 people.
A man wearing a belt packed with explosives blew himself up outside the Rafidiyan Bank just after it opened Tuesday morning, said Gen. Sherko Shakir, Kirkuk’s police chief.
A crowd of street vendors and elderly men and women waiting outside the bank bore the brunt of the blast, and a pregnant woman and several children were among the victims.
Body parts were strewn for 20 yards in every direction from the blast. The bodies of several victims were found in the rubble of a nearby pedestrian overpass. Two cars were set on fire.
“It was the biggest awful crime in Kirkuk since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” Shakir said.
Terrorist group al-Qaeda’s northern affiliate, the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for both suicide bombings in northern Iraq and threatened more violence in retaliation for the arrests and killings of Sunni Arabs.
The U.S. soldier was killed on the 230th anniversary of the formation of the U.S. Army. At least 1,704 U.S. military members have died since the war began in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
