150 killed by Iraq suicide truck bomb

The blast targeting ethnic Turkmans at a market in a northern Iraqi village injures 250. A car bomb in Diyala province kills 22 Shiite Kurds. Two U.S. soldiers die in Baghdad explosion.
By Ned Parker
Times Staff Writer

11:01 AM PDT, July 7, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A suicide truck bomb ripped a village market in a northern Iraq today, killing 150 people and wounding 250, said Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin, the police chief of Tuz Khurmatu.

The blast targeted the region's ethnic Turkman population on a weekend when a car bomb also killed 22 Shiite Kurds in neighboring Diyala province on the Iranian border. The two areas are fraught with tensions as Iraq's religious and ethnic groups compete for power.

The truck bomb today struck an outdoor market in Amerli, about 12 miles south of the city of Tuz Khurmatu. Shops and homes were destroyed, and people were buried under the debris, police said.

Kurds are lobbying to make Tuz Khurmatu part of Kurdistan through a provision of the Iraqi constitution that calls for the settling of the status of territories such as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where Saddam Hussein settled Arabs and displaced Kurds in the 1970s and 1980s.

Meanwhile, a bomb blast killed two U.S. soldiers on a foot patrol in Baghdad on Friday, the military announced, while a British soldier died during an operation in the southern port of Basra. A soldier from Fiji died in a non-combat related incident, the British military said, but no further information was available.

On the political front, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki told reporters that radical cleric Muqtada Sadr's movement needed to confront wayward members of its Mahdi Army militia who are committing acts of violence.

"I call upon the brothers of the Sadr movement to take clear and decisive decisions in order not to bear the responsibility of those using its name in killing, terrorism and outlaw acts everywhere," Maliki said.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari announced that officials from the Iranian Embassy had visited the five Iranian nationals who were detained by the U.S. military in January. U.S. officials have accused the men of belonging to Iran's Al Quds Force, the covert branch of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard. However, Iran insists the men are diplomats.

ned.parker@latimes.com

Times staff writers Wail Alhafith, Saif Rasheed and Raheem Salman contributed to this report.