Kirkuk will be flashpoint

This is the latest entry in a thread I began on The Augusta Chronicle bulletin board titled
Kirkuk will be flashpoint:

Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush's plan to surge 17,500 additional U.S. troops in Baghdad and 4,000 more U.S. troops into Anbar province does nothing to quell violence in many other parts of Iraq including the disputed oil rich city of Kirkuk and surrounding oil rich region. More blood evidence of this surfaced today, and as anyone who reads this thread can tell, it doesn't take a PhD to figure out that security in Baghdad (were it possible with only 17,500 extra troops) is not the key to stemming growing violence in the rest of Iraq. He ain't known as Duh-bya for nothing!

Suicide truck bomb hits police in Iraq's Kirkuk

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Reuters 5:17 am EST Wed 17 Jan 2007

A suicide bomber driving a truck packed with explosives hit a police station in central Kirkuk on Wednesday and residents reported many casualties, though police had no immediate details on the dead and wounded.

A police source said many buildings in the area suffered severe damage from the blast, but declined to confirm reports of casualties. One resident of the northern Iraqi city told Reuters he saw many casualties lying in the street and several buildings had collapsed.

Sitting atop one of the world's richest oil fields, Kirkuk is just outside the borders of the largely autonomous Kurdistan region and its population is a volatile mix of Kurds, Turkmen and Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs.

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Faire l'amour, pas la guerre
Make love not war

Kirkuk will be flashpoint

The following is the latest entry in a thread I started on The Augusta Chronicle bulletin board titled Kirkuk will be flashpoint :

United States President and Commander-in-Chief of U.S. military forces George W. Bush told the American people in a speech on January 10, 2007 that he was responsible for mistakes that had been made in the U.S. war in Iraq. Against the advice of the Iraq Study Group and the longstanding positions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his top military commanders including Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, Mr. Bush has ordered, after nearly 3 years and 10 months of a failed war, an increase in U.S. military forces in Iraq with the primary objective of bringing security to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a city of over 6 million inhabitants.

Iraq has a total population at least 4 times that of Baghdad. Anbar province is restive as is Diyala province. Even the British forces in southern Iraq have experienced increasing sectarian violence as well as violence directed at them.

Why does President Bush, who accepts responsibility for overall command of U.S. forces in Iraq, not think or plan for violence to break out in Kirkuk, Mosul, Tall Afar, Baquoba, Ramadi, Fallujah, Samarra, Takrit, Najaf, Basra, and many other Iraqi cities, towns, and villages as he focuses to bring security to Baghdad? That is plenty of evidence already on the record to indicate that this will be the case. President Bush's latest plan is only a prescription for continued and escalating violence leading to catastrophic failure. What will Bush's move be when that happens? What is Plan B? Will Bush attack Iran and/or Syria?

Iraq oil city rocked by attacks

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AFP 4:40 am EST Sat 13 Jan 2007

Iraq's northern oil hub of Kirkuk has been rocked by attacks as insurgents shot dead two contractors and blew up a Shiite mosque under construction.

Gunmen planted explosives in the mosque in the Nida neighbourhood of eastern Kirkuk and flattened the building site, Captain Imad Jassim said Saturday.

Seventy-five percent of the mosque had been built before it was pancaked in the explosion.

In central Kirkuk, gunmen shot dead two contractors tasked with building access lanes and wounded another two workers.

The assailants opened fire on the men while they were working next to the main highway that runs through Kirkuk from Baghdad before fleeing, Jassim said.

Another three people were wounded and a house partly damaged when mortar rounds slammed into Kirkuk's Nasir neighbourhood, Colonel Anwar Qadir said.

Further south, in the flashpoint city of Samarra, a Sunni prayer leader and member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Yunis Wuhaib, was assassinated outside his home in the southern Sikak neighbourhood, police Captain Hashim Ahmed said.

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Faire l'amour, pas la guerre
Make love not war