Bombing kills 55 in Kirkuk restaurant

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A suicide bomber detonated explosives inside a popular restaurant just outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Thursday, killing 55 people and wounding scores more during a meeting of Sunni Arab leaders and Kurdish officials to discuss efforts to bring down ethnic tensions.

Hundreds of families were inside the Abdullah restaurant, one of the city’s landmarks, celebrating the end of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, police and hospital officials said. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq in recent months. Many of the victims were women and children.

“I had just finished lunch and went to the washing area, leaving my family and relatives sitting at the table, when the explosion happened,” said Kamal Aziz Khokaram, 55, a Kurdish businessman. “I fell to the ground and then got up and hurried back to see two of my friends stretched out on the floor, stained in blood. My wife and my three children were wounded. I saw scores of the wounded, some standing up bleeding, and others lying on the floor soaked in blood.”

The attack appeared to be an attempt to disrupt efforts to calm tensions in Kirkuk. The city’s ethnic Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen communities are in a bitter struggle for control over land and oil. Arabs and Turkmens want the area to remain under central government control, while Kurds seek to include it in their autonomous region in northern Iraq.

Hasan Nusayef al-Jubury, a leading figure in the Arab community, said a group of Arab tribal, social and religious leaders had been invited to the restaurant by members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a Kurdish political party led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

“We were sitting in the first hall of the restaurant, which has two other halls, when a huge explosion in the middle hall rocked the entire structure and destroyed everything. We were not hurt, but we still don’t know if we were the target, or the suicide attack just targeted the restaurant as a whole,” Jubury said.

Kirkuk General Hospital received the bodies of six children under 16 years of age, 14 young men, seven other men and an unspecified number of bodies that were badly burned and disfigured, said Omran Abdullah Hasan, a doctor there. Victims were also sent to other hospitals.

“This is a dangerous criminal act the likes of which I had never seen in my life,” said Khokaram, the Kurdish businessman. “In the past few months we started to feel secure, but today we lost everything.”

In July, a bomber targeted a protest march and the mostly Kurdish crowd blamed Turkmen extremists, attacking and setting afire a Turkmen political office. At least two dozen people died.