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Start Planning AFP/Yahoo 'reports' below. Didn't bother to ask Bush what he plan on doing why |
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Jan 1, Baghdad blast death toll hits eight, deadly ethnic clashes rock Kirkuk BAGHDAD (AFP) - The death toll
from a powerful car bomb that tore apart a Baghdad restaurant on
New Year's Eve rose to eight as ethnic violence claimed the
lives of two Kurds and an Arab in the tense oil centre of Kirkuk.
The blast gutted the popular Nabil restaurant in the upmarket
Karrada district packed with revellers ushering in 2004 despite
increased security over the Christmas and New Year holidays by
the US-led coalition and Iraqi police.
"I can confirm that eight people have been killed,"
a spokesman for the US-led coalition in Iraq (news
- web
sites) told AFP, without disclosing the nationalities of the
victims.
Iraq's interior ministry earlier put the dead at five, all
Iraqis, and the number of wounded at 24, including three Los
Angeles Times reporters and four staff members of the
newspaper's Baghdad bureau.
US troops have been on high alert since the capture of ousted
strongman Saddam Hussein three weeks ago and the restaurant attack came amid
an aggressive US operation to root out insurgents.
But the US army said it had ruled out a suicide bombing.
"It is starting to shape up as someone who parked the
vehicle and ran away and detonated it by remote control,"
but died fleeing the strong blast, a US officer said. He said the attack did not fit the pattern of insurgent
strikes because it targeted a place with no clear links to the
coalition, Iraqi officials or other organisations involved in
the country's reconstruction.
Karrada has been hit by two roadside bombs in the past few
days that killed five Iraqis, two of them children. And on
Christmas Day, a wave of attacks targeted a major hotel, three
embassies and the heavily fortified headquarters compound of the
coalition, although there were no deaths.
The US officer raised the possibility the explosion, which
levelled the restaurant and the building behind it and blew out
windows in a three-block radius, could even be a settling of old
scores.
The Christian-owned restaurant, which serves alcohol and
often brings in belly dancers for customers, is popular with
both Westerners and the Iraqi elite.
Further north in Kirkuk, ethnic tensions erupted into deadly
violence again as two Kurds were found stabbed to death and an
Arab was killed in clashes with police trying to quell anti-Kurd
attacks.
"Unknown attackers stabbed two Kurds to death and threw
their bodies near a bridge in the centre of the city,"
Kirkuk police chief Turhan Yussef said.
A Sunni Arab man was killed and two others injured by
security forces in the south of the city where armed Arabs and
Turkmens were trying to attack Kurdish targets, Yussef's deputy
Sirzad Rifaat Kader said. Heavy gunfire could be heard in the centre of the city, where
the streets were deserted and in darkness because of a power
cut.
Tensions have been simmering between Kurds, Arabs and
Turkmens in the city of almost one million people since the
collapse of Saddam's regime in April.
About 2,000 Turkmen and Sunni Arabs staged a protest
Wednesday against a push by the city's Kurdish majority to
incorporate it into an autonomous Kurdish province but the event
soon turned violent.
Three people were killed and 31 injured by shots said to have
been fired by gunmen from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
although the group's Kirkuk chief Jalal Jawhar blamed Saddam
loyalists.
Last week, thousands of Kurds took to the streets of Kirkuk
to lay claim to the city where Saddam's regime settled large
numbers of Arabs from the 1970s.
In other developments Thursday, the United Nations (news
- web
sites) transferred 2.6 billion dollars to the Fund for the
Development of Iraq, which is managed by the US-British
coalition.
And US President George W. Bush (news
- web
sites) said that James Baker, his special envoy appointed to
try to ease Iraq's 120 billion dollar debt burden, would be
travelling to the Middle East, although he gave no specific
dates.
Britain's Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said British troops
would still be in Iraq in a year's time -- but he stressed they
would be there to support a transitional government rather than
as an occupying force.
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