Bomb Kills 9 In Northern Iraq
A suicide car bomb exploded near a regional government ministry in a predominantly Kurdish province of Sulaimaniyah on Tuesday, killing at least nine people and wounding four, a security official said.
Separately, two U.S. Marines were killed by a roadside bomb during fighting with insurgents in western Iraq, the military said Tuesday.
The blast occurred on the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah, right outside the ministry, that houses Kurdish forces known as peshmerga. The explosion killed six peshmerga and three civilians and wounded two peshmerga and two civilians, said Lt. Col. Taha Redha, a peshmerga official.
It was one of two suicide attacks by insurgents on Tuesday in the generally peaceful province 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.
About 45 minutes earlier, a suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into a seven-car convoy carrying Mullah Bakhtiyar, a senior Kurdish official in President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, said police Col. Najim Al-Din Qader. The blast in Sulaimaniya city wounded two of the convoy's guards and damaged two of its cars, Qader said.
Sulaimaniyah — the city and province share the same name — is where the PUK party is based, and it is considered one of the most peaceful areas of Iraq.
In other developments:
The deaths of the Marines occurred Friday near Amiriyah, 25 miles west of Baghdad, the military said in a statement.
The Marines were assigned to the Regimental Combat Team 8, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward).
The deaths raised to 1,999 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
In Baghdad, Iraqi and U.S. forces Tuesday refortified a hotel complex housing foreign journalists after
the day before, killing as many as 20 Iraqis and wounding about 40.The crews repaired a breach in the blast walls around the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. One of the bombs had blown a hole in the wall, enabling a cement truck packed with explosives to enter the compound and detonate, causing considerable damage to the Palestine Hotel, which houses The Associated Press, Fox News and other media organizations.
Most of the victims in the attack were people driving or walking through the area.
The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq was expected on Tuesday to announce final results in the country's landmark constitutional referendum, which was held on Oct. 15 under tight security to prevent insurgent attacks at polling stations.
Many Sunni Arabs oppose the draft document, believing it would divide Iraq into three competing regions, but to defeat the constitution the minority needs to produce a two-thirds "no" vote in three of Iraq's 18 provinces.
Kurds or majority Shiites favor the document, and that has been clear in the solid "yes" vote of many of the provinces where they form a majority.
On Monday, the Electoral Commission released the final tallies in 14 of the country's 18 provinces. It said the constitution was overwhelmingly rejected in two: Anbar by nearly 97 percent and Salahuddin by about 82 percent. Both are predominantly Sunni Arab.
That is why attention was now focusing on the results of Ninevah, an ethnically mixed northern province where Sunnis could theoretically produce enough "no" votes to defeat the constitution. Ninevah has been a focus of fraud allegations since preliminary results showed an overwhelming majority of voters had approved the constitution, despite a significant Sunni Arab population there.
But representatives of the commission reiterated on Monday that they had found no cases of election violations that significantly affected results.
If approved, the constitution would be another major step in the country's democratic transformation, clearing the way for the election of a new Iraqi parliament Dec. 15. Such steps are important in any decision about the future withdrawal of U.S.-led forces from Iraq.