Bomber Kills 20 in Contested Iraqi City

A suicide attacker detonated an explosives-laden belt Tuesday outside a bank in the divided northern city of Kirkuk, authorities said, killing at least 20 people and injuring 83 as another bloody day unfolded in Iraq.

The victims of the latest carnage in Kirkuk, an ethnic battleground claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens, included retirees collecting their subsistence pensions and child laborers on the busy street.

The blast occurred a few hours before Massoud Barzani, who seeks to incorporate Kirkuk into an expanded Kurdish zone, took his oath as the first president of the Kurdish semiautonomous region. It was not immediately clear whether the bombing was meant as a warning against Kurdish aims for Kirkuk.

In other violence, four U.S. troops were reported killed in three incidents and five Iraqi soldiers died in a car bombing northeast of the capital.

Meanwhile, the morgue in Baghdad reported receiving two dozen bodies, some beheaded, all apparently victims of ambushes along the perilous roads of western Iraq. At least 11 were believed to have been Iraqi employees of a U.S.-based reconstruction firm, American-Iraqi Solutions Group, Associated Press reported. A convoy of the organization’s workers was attacked Sunday by gunmen firing from a highway overpass, the news service said.

The bloodshed persisted as Iraqi lawmakers continued to wrangle over the makeup of a key National Assembly committee charged with drafting a new constitution. Sunni Muslim Arabs, who widely boycotted the Jan. 30 national election and are underrepresented in the legislature, seek to increase their numbers on the panel. But no deal has been struck.

More than 1,000 Iraqis and others have been killed since Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari named his government April 28, according to news service tallies.

Experts say it is not surprising that violence continues to plague Kirkuk, given the high stakes of the conflict. The city is about 150 miles north of Baghdad near one of the country’s largest oil reserves, and is symbolically important to many Iraqis. The area was relatively quiet in the first months after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 but has become the site of frequent bombings, assassinations and other attacks.

Tuesday’s strike was carried out by a suicide bomber who set off his lethal belt along a crowded street outside a bank, said Brig. Torhan Yousif, the chief of police in Kirkuk. The death toll seemed sure to rise, authorities said.

The explosion left a familiar scene of chaos as bodies, body parts and wreckage were blown about the blood-smeared street, and dazed survivors sought to help the injured.

One woman at the gate of the general hospital in Kirkuk was crying and pleading with the guards to allow her to go inside and see her 13-year-old son, who worked at a toy shop near the blast site. When she was allowed to enter the emergency room, however, she learned that he was dead.

“I went out to see a horrible scene,” said Nibras Abdul Razaq, owner of the Milad Hotel, which was damaged in the attack. “I hurried to help the people, and other men joined me.”

In an Internet posting, the Al Qaeda-affiliated guerrilla group Ansar al Sunna claimed responsibility for the Kirkuk attack, AP reported. In the past, Ansar al Sunna has acknowledged that its operatives carried out attacks with explosive belts or vests, which enable them to enter areas where vehicles are banned because of the widespread threat of car bombs.

The guerrilla movement, which is dominated by Sunni Arabs, rejects both the Shiite Muslim-dominated central government and the new Kurdish-run autonomous region whose border begins north of Kirkuk.

Restoring security to violence-plagued Iraq is the biggest challenge facing Jafari, a Shiite whose government received a vote of confidence Tuesday from the Shiite-dominated National Assembly.

The five Iraqi soldiers killed Tuesday were victims of a car bomb that exploded beside a road northeast of Baghdad as their convoy passed by. The blast wounded three soldiers and two civilians. Three mortar shells also landed on a nearby police station in the town of Kanaan, police said, wounding one officer.

The four U.S. military fatalities reported Tuesday occurred in separate incidents: A rocket-propelled grenade killed a military policeman Tuesday as he was on patrol in the capital, a Marine was killed by a roadside bomb during combat near Fallouja and two troops assigned to a Marine unit died Monday when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle near the city of Ramadi, west of the capital.

The killings brought the number of U.S. military deaths since the Iraq war began to at least 1,705, according to Associated Press.

The Iraqi government Tuesday also announced the arrest of a suspect described as a key member of militant Abu Musab Zarqawi’s network in Iraq, AP reported. The suspect, Jassim Hazan Hamadi Bazi, was arrested June 7 and was said to have constructed remote-controlled bombs and suicide blast vehicles. Iraqi and U.S. authorities have reported numerous arrests of reputed Zarqawi associates in recent months, a period in which violence has surged.

Special correspondent Ali Windawi in Kirkuk and Times staff writers Saif Rasheed and Zainab Hussein in Baghdad contributed to this report.