TAZA KHURMATU, IRAQ, AND BAGHDAD — A suicide truck bomb killed at least 70 people Saturday and wounded 182 in a primarily Turkmen town in northern Iraq, less than two weeks before the scheduled withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the cities.
The bombing, which could exacerbate ethnic tensions in the volatile Kirkuk region, came as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki warned that more attacks were expected as U.S. soldiers exit urban centers.
Residents of the Shiite Turkmen town of Taza Khurmatu, about 10 miles south of the city of Kirkuk, had just finished prayers at a mosque when the attacker detonated his explosives-laden truck.
Witnesses said the blast leveled more than 80 clay brick homes and damaged the mosque. Rescuers dug through mounds of rubble looking for the wounded and pulling out the dead.
Medical officials said at least 70 people had been killed and 182 wounded and they worried that the casualty figures would rise. The bombing is the latest in a series of attacks on northern Iraq's Turkmen minority since 2003.
Taza Khurmatu sits in an oil-rich area home to a combustible mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. Kurds wish to annex the Kirkuk region to Kurdistan, their semi-autonomous zone in northern Iraq. Arabs and Turkmens fiercely oppose such a move. Outside experts worry that the competition for control of the region could spark communal violence.
"The impact of the blast threw me into a store. A big fireball was coming my way," Mohammed Bashir said from his hospital bed in Kirkuk. Three of his relatives were killed, he said.
Bashir demanded to know why his rural district had been targeted again and asked that the U.S. military not reduce its troop presence in the area.
"We demand for the American forces to stay because their withdrawal means the return of Al Qaeda and . . . the return of sectarian war in all parts of Iraq, even after the relative security improvements," he said.
"This explosion is only the start," he added. "We will see more. What will happen later after the pullout of American forces? It will be even worse."
Turkmen politician Ali Mehdi, who sits on Kirkuk's provincial council and is a leader of the Kirkuk branch of the Turkmen Front party, called on Baghdad to give his community its own security force to protect its villages, as opposed to relying on mixed Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen forces.
