Truck bomber kills 13, injures dozens in Kirkuk

Plan to relocate Arabs
The attack comes days after the Iraqi government endorsed plans to relocate thousands of Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaign to force ethnic Kurds out of the city in an effort to undo one of the former dictator’s most enduring and hated policies.

Kurds are seeking to incorporate the city, 180 miles north of Baghdad, and into their nearby autonomous region. But the move has met strong opposition from Sunni Arabs who fear being isolated from Iraq’s oil riches, which are concentrated in the north and the mainly Shiite south.

The ancient city of Kirkuk has a large minority of ethnic Turks as well as Christians, Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians. The city is just south of the Kurdish autonomous zone stretching across three provinces of northeastern Iraq.

Iraq’s constitution sets an end-of-the-year deadline for a referendum on Kirkuk’s status. Since Saddam’s fall four years ago, thousands of Kurds who once lived in the city have resettled there. It is now believed Kurds are a majority of the population and that a referendum on attaching Kirkuk to the Kurdish autonomous zone would pass easily.

A parked car exploded in a garage near a governmental property registration agency in western Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 10, police said, adding that five cars and some nearby buildings were damaged. The religiously mixed Baiyaa neighborhood has been a frequent target of suspected Sunni insurgents who are usually blamed for such bombings.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, a suicide bomber drove his car into a police checkpoint in the southern insurgent stronghold of Dora, killing four people, including two policemen, and wounding six, police said.

Withdrawal timetable
With U.S. voters increasingly impatient with the conduct of the war and the American death toll rising, Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate have pushed through funding bills with timetables for withdrawing forces. The measures need to be reconciled before they are sent to President Bush, who has promised a veto.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who was part of the McCain delegation, said setting a deadline would be a “huge mistake” and Bush would be right to use his veto because the security plan — to which Bush has pledged 30,000 extra American troops — was working.

In other violence Monday, according to police:

• A roadside bomb killed four civilians and wounded 20 others in the Shiite town of Khalis, north of Baghdad in the volatile Diyala province.
• A roadside bomb struck an Iraqi military convoy, killing one soldier and wounding seven in the Qazaniyah area northeast of Baghdad, near the Iranian border.
  

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