Baghdad - A car bomb exploded outside a police station in
the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, wounding at least 15
people, police there said.
The bomb attack, which targeted the police station in Mosul's city
centre, some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, was the most serious
attack in Iraq since US soldiers withdrew from Iraqi cities and towns
on June 30.
Militants marked that occasion with a truck bombing in the
northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk that killed at least 30 people and left
at dozens of others wounded.
Also in Mosul on Sunday, two militants threw grenades at police
patrolling the Corniche neighbourhood of the city. The grenades
missed their target, but wounded at least five civilian bystanders,
police told the German Press Agency dpa.
Mosul, the capital of Iraq's Nineveh province, which is home to
one of the most diverse mix of ethnic and religious groups in Iraq,
remains the site of deadly, near-daily attacks.
In recent weeks, there have been signs of a brewing political
confrontation between Kurds and Arabs in the region around the city.
Politicians from the Arab nationalist Hadbaa List elected in
January's provincial polls took a hard line on Kurdish militiamen in
the security forces in the weeks ahead of the scheduled US withdrawal
from the city.
'I expect that the Kurds will withdraw from the city and there
will be a single security force in the city, with not a single Kurd
or (Kurdish) Peshmerga (militiaman) in it,' Athil al-Najifi, the
local governor, told dpa on June 21, a week ahead of the partial US
withdrawal.
Two weeks prior, Deputy Speaker of Parliament Aref Tayour, from
the Kurdish Democratic Party, had proposed dividing Nineveh into two
provinces, to reflect the geographic split between areas that voted
for the predominantly Kurdish Brotherly List to power in January's
polls, and those that voted for the Hadbaa List.
Those remarks drew prompt criticism from Sunni members of
parliament from the region, as did the Kurdish Regional Government's
passage of a new draft constitution for the semi-autonomous Kurdish
region of northern Iraq on June 24.
The draft, which will go to a regional referendum as part of the
July 25 Kurdish parliamentary elections, included predominantly
Kurdish parts of Nineveh, and the similarly ethnically divided
provinces of Kirkuk and Diyala, in its definition of Kurdistan.
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