A girl walks amidst the rubble of a collapsed Civil Defence building after a car bomb attack in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad, August 11, 2007. The car bomb exploded inside the compound of the Civil Defence headquarters in Baiji on Saturday, wounding two people, police said. REUTERS/Sabah al-Bazee (IRAQ)
Truck Bombs Kill 175 in Iraq's North
Religious Sect Targeted By 4 Coordinated Blasts
By Megan Greenwell and Dlovan Brwari
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 15, 2007; A01
BAGHDAD, Aug. 14 -- At least 175 people were killed Tuesday night by four truck bombs in a massive coordinated attack against members of a small religious sect, the Yazidis, in northern Iraq, the Iraqi army said.
The nearly simultaneous explosions, in three Yazidi communities near the town of Sinjar, added up to the deadliest attack in Iraq this year and one of the most lethal since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Hundreds of wounded people were flown or driven to hospitals, overwhelming every emergency room in the region, according to George Shlimon, vice mayor of the nearby city of Dahuk.
In Baghdad, the U.S. military reported the deaths of nine American military personnel in three incidents, including the crash of a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter. A truck bomb rendered impassable a bridge on a major route from Baghdad to the north.
Khidr Farhan was on his way to buy vegetables when the first truck bomb exploded near the market in his tiny Yazidi enclave. "I found myself flying through the air, and my face was burning," he said from his hospital bed in Dahuk, where he was recovering from a concussion, a broken leg and a broken rib.
"I felt my leg hurting, and I knew my head was bleeding," he said. "Then I couldn't feel anything. When I woke up, I was in the hospital."
During an interview with a Washington Post special correspondent, Farhan began to cry. "Where is my family?" he said. "I left my wife and my four children at home. Did they die?"
Haji Sido was driving from his workplace to his home in the Tall Aziz community when another of the bombs exploded there. He was not injured, but most of the mud-walled huts in the village collapsed and dead bodies littered the ground, he recounted.
"I ran past people screaming on the ground," he said. "I didn't care, because I had to get to my family. When I got home, my wife said: 'Calm down and thank God. We are safe.' "
Like other recent, large-scale bombing attacks, Tuesday's took place in an area with a relatively small military presence. Since the United States sent an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq this year, insurgents have increasingly targeted areas outside military control. Last month, a bombing near the city of Kirkuk -- another northern city that did not receive additional troops -- killed about 150 people.
The Yazidis are an ancient group whose faith combines elements of many historical religions of the region. They worship a peacock archangel and are considered Satanists by some Muslims and Christians in Iraq, a characterization they reject.
Yazidis largely live apart from other Iraqis, in villages near the Syrian border, to maintain religious purity, and they are forbidden to fraternize with other groups. Most Yazidis speak Kurdish but object to being called Kurds.
Despite such isolation, tensions among the Yazidis, Muslim Kurds and Arab groups in northern Iraq have led to increasingly violent incidents. In April, a 17-year-old Yazidi girl was stoned to death after she eloped with a Sunni Muslim man and converted to Islam. Cellphone video footage of her death, called an "honor killing" by other Yazidis, was broadcast widely on the Internet, setting off a wave of attacks against the group.
Two weeks later, 23 Yazidi factory workers were dragged off a bus and executed in Mosul in apparent retaliation for the teenager's death. Police attributed the attack to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.
No one asserted responsibility for Tuesday's bombings. Khairi Bozani, a Yazidi who lives in Sinjar, called them the most recent step in a campaign by other Iraqi groups to drive Yazidis out of the country. "They are trying to finish the Yazidis," Bozani said. "If the girl hadn't been killed, they would have found another excuse to attack us."
In Anbar province Tuesday, five Americans died when the Chinook helicopter went down during a training flight, the military said. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
Three other U.S. soldiers were killed Monday by a roadside bomb in the province of Nineveh, in northwestern Iraq, officials said, while one was killed in combat in western Baghdad.
The bridge that was hit by a truck bomb was located in Taji, north of Baghdad.
The vehicle, a fuel tanker, had just passed through an Iraqi army checkpoint about 8:30 a.m. when it detonated on the bridge. The blast killed 10 people and sent three cars plunging into a canal that joins the Tigris River, authorities said. It also destroyed the northern section of the bridge.
The bridge had been operating with only one lane since a bombing in May. It is part of an important artery between Baghdad and Mosul, the biggest city in the north.
In recent months, suicide bombers have repeatedly attacked key bridges around the capital in an attempt to disrupt road traffic and isolate the city. In April, a truck bomb destroyed a large portion of the historic Sarafiya bridge over the Tigris River; on Sunday, a replacement floating span was officially opened.
Also Tuesday, a deputy oil minister was kidnapped by armed men at his home in the Oil Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad, according to ministry spokesman Assem Jihad. Abdel Jabar al-Wagaa, the senior assistant to Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani, was seized along with several other ministry staff members, Jihad said.
The abduction was carried out by gunmen wearing Iraqi security force uniforms who entered the compound late Tuesday afternoon in more than a dozen official vehicles, according to the spokesman.
On May 29, five Britons were kidnapped from the nearby Finance Ministry. No group has asserted responsibility for either incident, and the victims have not been located.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military announced that it has begun a major new offensive involving 16,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. Operation Lightning Hammer is targeting fighters of al-Qaeda in Iraq in the areas surrounding Baqubah, the capital of Diyala.
The number of bombings in Baqubah and Baghdad has declined significantly since 30,000 additional U.S. troops arrived in Iraq this year. But large-scale attacks in smaller towns and rural areas have led some observers to conclude that insurgent groups have merely relocated.
In an interview last week, Brig. Gen. John M. "Mick" Bednarek, who has led the military operation in Baqubah, said that the city has been largely stabilized and that many of the 10,000 troops there would be used to expand the U.S. presence elsewhere in Diyala.
Talks among Iraq's top political leaders continued Tuesday at a summit that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said he hopes can repair his fractured government.
Maliki did not speak publicly after Tuesday's meetings, but other leaders said the discussions are to continue Wednesday.
Brwari reported from Mosul. Special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Dalya Hassan in Baghdad contributed to this report.
August 15, 2007
Death Toll in Iraq Bombings Rises to 250
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Aug. 15 — The toll in a horrific quadruple bombing in an area of mud and stone houses in the remote northern desert on Tuesday evening reached 250 dead and 350 wounded, several local officials said today, making it the single deadliest coordinated attack since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Rescuers and recovery teams were still digging through as many as 200 flattened houses and the death toll could still rise, the officials said. “It is impossible for us to give an exact figure for the dead and wounded,” said Dr. Kifah Kattu, director general the hospital in Sinjar, a few miles north of where the explosions occurred. The four truck bombs were set off in a Kurdish-speaking area dominated by members of the Yazidi religious sect, which combines elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions.
Dr. Kattu cited one village in the area of the explosions, called Al Aziz, where he said 40 of the simple homes had been obliterated and no dead or wounded had yet been recovered. A farmer who survived one explosion, Hasson Dalali, 59, said in a hospital in Tal Afar, a town 25 miles east of the explosions, that he had lost eight members of his family.
“I saw a flash in the sky; I never saw anything like this before,” Mr. Dalali said. He said that after two huge explosions threw him to the ground where he was working his fields, he rushed to his house to check on his family. “The house was completely flattened to the ground,” Mr. Dalali said. “I was looking for any survivor from my family in the rubble. I found only my 12-year-old nephew.”
The nephew had broken ribs and legs and severe wounds to the head, Mr. Dalali said.
Security officials said that the devastation came when two pairs of truck bombs exploded about 5 miles apart in an area close to the Syrian border in what is known as the Shaam Desert. An official at the Interior Ministry in Baghdad said that precise information on the bombings was particularly difficult to obtain because the road between Sinjar and Tal Afar was partly controlled by an Qaeda-linked insurgent group, the Islamic State of Iraq, which is a prime suspect in the bombings.
The area has long been a focus of insurgent activity, prompting a major American-led offensive in 2005 designed to clear the area of groups linked to al Qaeda. Nevertheless, last March a twin truck bombing killed 152 people in Tal Afar, and in July, 155 people died in a single enormous explosion in the northern town of Amerli, the largest death toll in a single attack until this one.
All three towns lie north of the main areas affected by the increase in American troop strength that began in March, supporting the notion that, as in numerous earlier American offensives, insurgents have moved from where they are being attacked and restarted their operations elsewhere.
Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the top American military spokesman in Iraq, said on Wednesday that there were improvements in security as a result of the troop increase but also said progress was “gradual and sometimes it is uneven, just as we see a mosaic of uneven conditions in Iraq today.”
Asked why insurgents would pick such simple villages in the desert for such a colossal attack, General Bergner said: “Perhaps their vulnerability. Perhaps they were a target that they could attack.”
Religious and ethnic minorities have been constant targets of violence in Iraq, and the Amerli bombing was aimed at a community of Shiite Turkomans, who remain in the country in extremely small numbers. But the tension in Yazidi areas has been particularly high since April, when, in a primitive episode captured on video, Yazidis stoned to death a woman of their own sect for dating a Sunni Arab.
After a video of the stoning appeared on the Internet, Sunni gunmen stopped minibuses filled with Yazidis and killed 23 of them.
Stephen Farrell and other employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Tal Afar, Mosul and Baghdad.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
CREDIT: Reuters
The wreckage of a vehicle used in a car-bomb attack lies on a road in Kirkuk, 250 kilometres north of Baghdad on Tuesday. One policeman was killed while eight other people were wounded, police said.
Bombers target Yazidi religious minority group, wounding 200
Reuters
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The wreckage of a vehicle used in a car-bomb attack lies on a road in Kirkuk, 250 kilometres north of Baghdad on Tuesday. One policeman was killed while eight other people were wounded, police said.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) -- Suicide bombers driving fuel tankers killed at least 175 people in apparently coordinated attacks in northwestern Iraq on Tuesday, the Iraqi army said, in one of the worst incidents of its kind in the four-year-old war.
Iraqi army captain Mohammad al-Jaad said at least another 200 people were wounded in the bombings in Yazidi residential compounds in the Kahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair areas near the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, close to the Syrian border.
The mayor of Sinjar, Dakheel Qassim Hasoun, gave the same casualty figures.
Police earlier said Tuesday's bombings appeared to target the Yazidis, members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect who live in northern Iraq and Syria.
The United States has sent an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq this year and moved them from large bases into small neighbourhood outposts in an effort to reduce sectarian violence in the capital and surrounding provinces.
The U.S. military said it was helping to ferry wounded people to hospitals in the town of Tal Afar.
First Lieut. Stephen Bomar, spokesman for the 25th Infantry Division, said initial reports suggested 30 people were killed and 60 wounded in attacks by two suicide bombers.
In November 2006, six car bombs in different parts of northeast Baghdad's sprawling Shi'ite slum of Sadr City killed 202 people and wounded 250, while multiple car bombs around the capital killed 191 around Baghdad in April.
In the worst single attack this year, a truck packed with explosives blew up in a market in the northern town of Tuz Khurmato in July, killing 150 people and wounding 250.
Earlier on Tuesday, a suicide truck bomber killed 10 people and destroyed a bridge linking Baghdad to the north.
The U.S. military also announced that 10 service members had died in the past two days, including five in a helicopter crash.
It said the CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed near al-Taqaddum air base outside Falluja, 50 km west of Baghdad, while on a "routine post-maintenance check flight."
There was no indication of whether it was shot down and an investigation was under way.
The deaths of the five on board the helicopter takes the total number of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein to at least 3,699.
So far in August at least 41 U.S. service members have died, already more than half of July's total of 71.
U.S. President George W. Bush, under pressure to show results in the unpopular war or start bringing troops home, has warned that August would be a bloody month.
U.S. forces launched Operation Lightning Hammer, a big offensive of 16,000 troops beginning with an airborne assault overnight, part of a major new push targeting Sunni Islamist al-Qaida fighters and Shi'ite militias accused of links with Iran.
The latest operation targets militants who fled an earlier crackdown in the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba. The larger, countrywide Operation Phantom Strike was announced on Monday.
Al-Qaida is widely seen as trying to influence debate in Washington by stepping up attacks in Iraq before a crucial progress report on the war is delivered to Congress on Sept. 15.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said U.S. forces would launch a series of operations over the next 30 days.
Yazidis have been the target of attacks before. In April, gunmen shot dead 23 Yazidi factory workers in Mosul in apparent retaliation for the stoning of a teenage Yazidi girl several weeks earlier.
Police said the girl had been stoned to death by local Yazidis after falling in love with a Muslim man and converting to Islam.
Yazidis in Iraq say they have often faced discrimination because the chief angel they venerate as a manifestation of God is often identified as the fallen angel Satan in biblical terminology.
Yazidis, who say they suffered massacres during the secular rule of Saddam Hussein, also believe God created good and evil in the world.
© The Leader-Post (Regina) 2007
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive
Death toll from Iraq bombings rises
Posted Wed Aug 15, 2007 5:22pm AEST
ABC Online, Australia - Aug 15, 2007
The death toll from brutal truck bombings targeting the ancient Yazidi religious sect in northern Iraq has risen to more than 200, according to a local government official.
The Mayor of Sinjar, a town in the northern province of Nineveh where four truck bombs exploded on Tuesday, voiced fears that the toll could rise further.
"More than 200 people were killed and an equal number of people are wounded," Dakhil Qassim Hassun said.
"The casualties are expected to rise as many victims are still trapped under the debris."
Four truck bombs exploded in the villages of Al-Khataniyah and Al-Adnaniyah, which are mainly inhabited by Yazidis, local officials said.
Authorities have imposed a total curfew in the area.
Mr Hassoun said only vehicles involved in rescue efforts would be allowed to travel through the area.
He said it would be impossible to establish a final death toll any time soon because many bodies were still buried in the rubble of up to 30 houses destroyed in the blasts.
Yazidis - who number some 500,000 - speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.
US response
The White House swiftly condemned the bombings as "barbaric attacks on innocent civilians," and vowed to help Iraqi forces "beat back these vicious and heartless murderers," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
The US military gave a lower death toll of 60, but said five car bombs had exploded in the region.
"Four vehicles were reported to have entered a crowded bus station and exploded as soon as they were inside of Khataniyah... killing approximately 30 people," the military said in a statement.
It said another car bomb exploded in a residential area of al-Jazeera, south-west of Khataniyah and also killed another 30 people.
US forces also said an unknown number of people were trapped under the debris and up to 20 houses were destroyed.
- AFP/Reuters
Iraqi officials: Truck bombings killed at least 500
* Story Highlights
* NEW: High number of deaths reported by local officials in northern Iraq
* Suicide truck bombs targeted mainly Kurdish religious minority Yazidi sect
* Yazidis stoned teenage Yazidi girl to death for being seen with Sunni man
* Sunnis then killed about two dozen Yazidi men in retaliation
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday.
Iraqi Army and Mosul police sources earlier put the number at 260, but said it was likely to rise. 320 were reported wounded.
The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.
The attacks, targeting Kurdish villages of the Yazidi religious minority, were attempts to "break the will" of the American people and show that the U.S. troop escalation -- the "surge" -- is failing, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon said.
The bombings highlight the kind of sectarian tensions the troop surge was designed to stop.
Al Qaeda in Iraq is predominantly Sunni, and Mixon said members of the Yazidi religious minority have received threatening letters, called "night letters," telling them "to leave because they are infidels."
"This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will -- almost genocide when you consider the fact the target they attacked and the fact that these Yazidis, out in a very remote part of Nineveh province, where there is very little security and really no security required to this point," Mixon said. VideoWatch the grim aftermath of the suicide bombings »
Sunni militants, including members of al Qaeda in Iraq, have targeted Yazidis in the area before.
Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said there were three suicide trucks carrying two tons of explosives. At least 30 houses and other buildings were destroyed.
Khalaf said the carnage looks like the aftermath of a "mini-nuclear explosion." More bodies are expected to be found. See a timeline of deadliest attacks in Iraq »
The U.S. military said there were five bombings -- four at a crowded bus station in Qahtaniya and a fifth in al-Jazeera.
The massacre comes ahead of next month's report to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on progress in Iraq.
"We still have a great deal of work to do against al Qaeda in Iraq, and we have great deal of work to do against al Qaeda networks in northern Iraq," Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesman, said Wednesday.
The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Sunni extremists for the "monstrous crime." He said a committee has been formed to investigate.
Ashraf Qazi, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative for Iraq, called the attack an "abominable crime aimed at widening the sectarian and ethnic divide in Iraq."
Qazi urged Iraqi authorities to bolster their efforts to protect minorities.
The Yazidi sect is a mainly Kurdish minority, an ancient group that worships seven angels, in the form of peacocks, who are subordinate to the supreme god who created the universe.
A couple of related incidents in the spring highlighted the tensions between Sunnis and Yazidis.
In April, a Kurdish Yazidi teenage girl was brutally beaten, kicked and stoned to death in northern Iraq by other Yazidis in what authorities said was an "honor killing" after she was seen with a Sunni Muslim man. Although she had not married him or converted, her attackers believed she had.
The Yazidis condemn mixing with people of another faith.
That killing is said to have spurred the killings of about two dozen Yazidi men by Sunni Muslims in the Mosul area two weeks later.
Attackers affiliated with al Qaeda pulled 24 Yazidi men out of a bus and slaughtered them, according to a provincial official.
CNN's Arwa Damon, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Raja Razek contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/08/15/iraq.main
Residents gather at the site of a suicide bomb attack in the village of Kahtaniya west of Mosul, northwest of Baghdad August 15, 2007. REUTERS/Azad Lashkari
Iraqis dig for bodies after bombs kill 200
Wed Aug 15, 2007 11:42PM BST
By Paul Tait
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Rescuers dug through the rubble of bomb-flattened buildings in a northern Iraqi village on Wednesday as residents, many dazed and crying, looked for loved ones after suicide attacks that killed more than 200 people.
The U.S. military said al Qaeda was the "prime suspect" in Tuesday night's co-ordinated truck bombings that hit residential areas of members of the minority Yazidi sect, who are viewed by Sunni militants as infidels.
U.S. officials have said they feared al Qaeda would launch a "spectacular" strike on civilians in the weeks leading up to mid-September, when the U.S. Congress is due to receive a progress report on the military and political fronts in Iraq.
The U.S. military launched a major new offensive in Iraq this week in a bid to thwart attacks by al Qaeda and Shi'ite militias. The operations are focused on the farmlands and villages around Baghdad that have been havens for militants.
In scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone, bodies lay in the street covered in blankets amid the shattered ruins of clay-built houses. The buildings, mostly one-storey structures, had been completely razed.
"This is a catastrophe that cannot be described in words," said the governor of Nineveh province, Duraid Kashmoula, adding that more than 200 people were killed and 300 wounded.
He said he believed the toll could rise as many were believed buried beneath the rubble that bulldozers were trying to shift. Many people were listed as missing.
Kashmoula declared the area a disaster zone and asked for central government help. When he toured the scene he was besieged by people pleading for help in finding loved ones.
"The scale of the destruction is unimaginable," said another visitor to the scene, a regional government official.
The official said attackers driving truck bombs made more lethal by cargos of pebbles struck the villages of Kahtaniya and al-Jazeera west of Iraq's third-largest city Mosul, wreaking devastation that stunned even war-numbed Iraqis.
Television pictures showed badly burned and screaming survivors, many of them children, in hospital.
"People there were desperate looking for their relatives. Some were digging through rubble with their hands. I saw 20 bodies in the street, some of them burned," said the official.
The death toll appeared to be the highest in any one attack since November, when six car bombs in different parts of Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City killed 200 people and wounded 250. Car bombs killed 191 around Baghdad on one day in April.
In a fresh attack in north Iraq on Wednesday, two car bombs struck a crowded market in a Kurdish area in the city of Kirkuk, killing five people and wounding 30, police said.
HALLMARKS
The U.S. military said it was too early to say who was responsible for Tuesday's truck blasts, but their scale and apparently coordinated nature were hallmarks of al Qaeda.
"We're looking at al Qaeda as the prime suspect," said U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver.
Iraq's political leaders, including Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, condemned the "heinous" bombings.
"This indiscriminate and heartless violence only strengthens our resolve to continue our mission against the terrorists who are plaguing the people of Iraq," U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and military commander General David Petraeus, who will both deliver the progress report, said in a joint statement.
In the aftermath of the blast, authorities imposed a total curfew in the Sinjar area, which is close to the Syrian border.
Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Donnelly, U.S. military spokesman for northern Iraq, said U.S. forces were assisting Iraqi emergency agencies as they sifted through the rubble.
Yazidis are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect who live in northern Iraq and Syria and say they are persecuted because of their beliefs. They tend to stay segregated from the people among whom they live.
"The town's residents are poor. They don't have any connection to a political party. The town has no police force and the army does not have a presence to protect it," said Kahtaniya resident Abu Salam.
In April, gunmen shot dead 23 Yazidi factory workers in Mosul in apparent retaliation for the stoning several weeks earlier of a teenaged Yazidi girl who police said had fallen in love with a Sunni Arab and converted to Islam.
(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny in Baghdad)
© Reuters 2006.
Erbil part of 'the other Iraq'
Bernd Debusmann
Reuters
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
ERBIL, Iraq -- The Ministry of Tourism for Kurdish northern Iraq has 417 employees and big plans.
"We need three or four times as many hotels as we have now," said the tourism minister, Nimrud Youkhana. "And we need to get more airlines to fly here."
Vacation in Iraq? More hotels in a country whose name evokes images of bombs, kidnappings and beheadings?
The three northern provinces, Erbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniya, have blossomed into a quasi-independent state in the 16 years since the United States placed a protective umbrella, or no-flight zone, over the region to stop a genocidal anti-Kurdish campaign waged by Saddam Hussein.
Administered by the Kurdistan Regional Government, the provinces have largely escaped the violence that has been tearing apart the rest of Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam and unleashed long-suppressed sectarian hostility.
"We have some way to go still," Youkhana said, "but we plan to eventually hold annual folklore events like the Jerash festival," an event in Jordan that draws international performers each summer.
The ministry is hoping to attract customers like Gulf Arabs who appreciate mountain resorts in an Alpine setting with a relaxed attitude toward alcohol, as well as Europeans in search of exotic destinations and archaeological remains dating back thousands of years.
There was even an ad campaign on U.S. television last year for "The Other Iraq," in which locals spoke of the relatively safely of the area compared to the rest of Iraq.
Youkhana's plans, and the mere existence of the Tourism Ministry, highlight a bullish view of the future of the Kurdish region, an optimism evident in building projects, from a 6,000-shop mall to a string of U.S.-style gated communities with names like Dream City, Empire Villas and American Village.
Near the airport, Naz City, a new complex of 14 high-rise apartment towers, is cabled for high-speed Internet. Hotels under construction include one by the German luxury chain Kempinski.
And rising in the shadow of Erbil's citadel, near where Alexander the Great defeated King Darius of Persia, the Nishtiman mall features the region's first escalator, a magnet for children riding it up and down in wide-eyed wonder.
There are no detailed figures on how much money has been invested in the region since 2003. The Board of Investment, a government agency set up last summer, has approved more than $3.5 billion in development projects.
The Kurds' main argument to persuade foreigners to visit and invest is security: there is no other place in Iraq where a foreigner can shop in local markets or walk the streets without fear of being killed or kidnapped.
"I feel safer in Erbil or Sulaimaniya than in Camden, New Jersey," said Harry Schute, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served in Iraq and is now a security adviser to the regional government's president, Massoud Barzani. "But people hear 'Iraq' and they think violence. There's a lack of understanding that Baghdad and Erbil are different worlds."
So different that the regional government has all the trappings of an independent state - its own flag, its own army, its own border patrol, its own national anthem, its own education system, even its own stamp inked into the passports of visitors.
Turkey, Iran and Syria -- all of which have sizable Kurdish minorities -- are viewing the regional government's progress with considerable concern. They fear that full independence for the Iraqi region would set off a chain reaction in the region.
The Iraqi Kurds' sense of tranquillity was shattered by two bombs in May - a truck bomb outside the regional government's Interior Ministry killed 15 people and wounded more than 100 and three days later, a car bomb in the office of Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party killed 30 people and injured 50.
The government responded by stepping up security, already tight, and virtually sealing the roads into regional-government-controlled territory to non-Kurds. Travelers from outside the region are not allowed to pass unless a Kurdish resident meets them in person and "guarantees" their stay.
Despite the May bombs, Austrian Airlines, the only European carrier with a regular service to Erbil, added a flight to its schedule in July to bring Vienna-Erbil connections to four a week. The flights are usually crowded.
"The bomb attacks did not dent business interest," said Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, who heads the Kurdish Development Corporation. "In fact, inquiries picked up after a few days."
They did not dent a booming business in luxury cars, either. "Things are looking good," said Lezan Shafeea, a sales manager at the sprawling Mercedes dealership in Erbil. "We are selling more top-end models, at $138,500 apiece, than midsize cars."
These are cash-only deals, because the region's embryonic financial system has no provision for consumer credit.
Obstacles to opening up the region to the world, Kurdish officials say, include the travel advisories governments issue to their citizens. The U.S. State Department, for example, makes no distinction between the Kurdish north and the rest of Iraq and "continues to strongly warn" against travel there.
But other countries have taken the region off their list of life-threatening destinations, said Falah Mustafa Bakir, who heads the Foreign Relations Department and is the region's de facto foreign minister. "Denmark, Japan, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands have all changed their advisories," he said.
Not even the rosiest optimist predicts a travel boom soon to the region, but a British company, Hinterland Travel, led a group of tourists in their 50s and 60s on a package tour through the three provinces administered by the regional government in May. Another is scheduled for September. "This is for people interested in archaeology and history," said the company's owner, Geoff Hann. "And who are not faint of heart."
© Reuters 2007
Iraqi Officials Lead Recovery Efforts After Devastating Khahtaniya and Jazeera Car-Bomb Attacks
Fri, 08/17/2007 - 14:47 — admin
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2007 – Local, provincial and central government leaders converged in western Nineveh province, Iraq, as 3rd Iraqi Army Division soldiers and emergency workers in the villages of Khahtaniya and Jazeera continued their rescue efforts in the wake of five car-bomb attacks that killed an estimated 275 people and wounded 400 others Aug. 14.
National, provincial and local leaders were greeted with cheers by citizens and relief workers. The group walked the streets assessing damages in both villages and interacting with citizens.
“So far the accounting of casualties has been very speculative,” said Army Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. “The villagers and rescue workers are still trying to find those missing, and their efforts, and those of the local, provincial and central government leadership, along with the ISF here, have been tremendous. These people are clearly unified in this effort.”
Soldiers from 3rd Iraqi Army Division, in conjunction with U.S. soldiers from 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, and 4th Squadron, 6th Air Cavalry Regiment, are assisting the recovery efforts. The 3rd Iraqi Army Division has provided earth-moving equipment and food and medical supplies to the villages, and Iraqi police are securing the areas, U.S. officials said.
“This is an act of desperation by a group of maniacs who continue to offer only death, destruction and violence to the innocent citizens of Iraq,” said Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, commander of 25th Infantry Division and Multinational Division North. “The efforts of the 3rd (Iraqi Army) soldiers are heroic as they continue to work tirelessly to save as many citizens as they can, proving their commitment to all of Iraq’s people regardless of ethnicity or sect.”
Coalition forces have provided 2,880 humanitarian meals, 4,608 bottled waters and vast amounts of medical supplies to include medicines and bandages. Coalition forces also have airlifted 5,760 additional meals, with 3,500 more being coordinated for distribution, and enough medical supplies to support roughly 2,000 casualties.
Source: AFISIraqi Officials Lead Recovery Efforts After Devastating Khahtaniya and Jazeera Car-Bomb Attacks
Fri, 08/17/2007 - 14:47 — admin
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2007 – Local, provincial and central government leaders converged in western Nineveh province, Iraq, as 3rd Iraqi Army Division soldiers and emergency workers in the villages of Khahtaniya and Jazeera continued their rescue efforts in the wake of five car-bomb attacks that killed an estimated 275 people and wounded 400 others Aug. 14.
National, provincial and local leaders were greeted with cheers by citizens and relief workers. The group walked the streets assessing damages in both villages and interacting with citizens.
“So far the accounting of casualties has been very speculative,” said Army Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. “The villagers and rescue workers are still trying to find those missing, and their efforts, and those of the local, provincial and central government leadership, along with the ISF here, have been tremendous. These people are clearly unified in this effort.”
Soldiers from 3rd Iraqi Army Division, in conjunction with U.S. soldiers from 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, and 4th Squadron, 6th Air Cavalry Regiment, are assisting the recovery efforts. The 3rd Iraqi Army Division has provided earth-moving equipment and food and medical supplies to the villages, and Iraqi police are securing the areas, U.S. officials said.
“This is an act of desperation by a group of maniacs who continue to offer only death, destruction and violence to the innocent citizens of Iraq,” said Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, commander of 25th Infantry Division and Multinational Division North. “The efforts of the 3rd (Iraqi Army) soldiers are heroic as they continue to work tirelessly to save as many citizens as they can, proving their commitment to all of Iraq’s people regardless of ethnicity or sect.”
Coalition forces have provided 2,880 humanitarian meals, 4,608 bottled waters and vast amounts of medical supplies to include medicines and bandages. Coalition forces also have airlifted 5,760 additional meals, with 3,500 more being coordinated for distribution, and enough medical supplies to support roughly 2,000 casualties.
Source: AFIS
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