Car-bomb attack: Hours after dozens of US cruise missiles struck Islamic militants in northern Iraq on Saturday, a car-bomb exploded at a checkpoint here and fear spread through the mountains as villagers fled and guerrillas crept back to bunkers, hauling away their dead in pick-up trucks, writes Jeffrey Fleishman, in Girdy Gou, northern Iraq
Refugees were crossing a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint at 2.58 p.m. local time when a white sedan blew up in an apparent suicide attack, sending smoke and flames 30 feet into the air.
The blast killed the driver, three Kurdish soldiers and one Australian journalist. Twenty-four people were injured, including three women, whose faces were torn by shrapnel.
The bombing was almost certainly a retaliation by the militants for the US-led air strikes, including 40 to 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles, which earlier struck munitions depots and offices of the militant group Komaly Islami and its more radical ally, Ansar al-Islam. Ansar, which the Bush administration has labelled a terrorist group, has been fighting the US-backed Kurdish government in this autonomous enclave for 19 months.
The missile attacks in the early morning killed and wounded about 100 guerrillas, according to a Kurdish military commander. The strikes echoed through valleys and canyons as thousands of villagers huddled in their mud-brick homes, waiting until dawn to load cars, tractors and donkeys and escape with their belongings.
Minutes before the car-bomb detonated, Miryam Tofiq, her hands trembling, stood near an old truck with all she could carry: a bundle of blankets, a few dresses, a kerosene heater, a picture of someone taken long ago. A man tried to calm her, but it was no use. She was a refugee again.
"Do you think this is a life?" she asked. "I have seven daughters. My husband stepped on a land mine and lost his leg. When will this end? We just hope this pain ends forever. I had to run out of my home barefoot. I am muddy. I have no sons. It's better to die than to live like this."
Tofiq was a little way down the road when the white sedan pulled up at the checkpoint. Television photographer Paul Moran moved closer and attempted to film the driver. The car exploded, demolishing a guardhouse. Papers and identity cards swirled in the wind and soldiers scrambled. Refugees stopped their tractors.
The sedan came from the village of Khurmal, where Ansar and Komaly fighters had gathered in the bazaar after the US strikes. As black smoke filled the sky, wounded and dead at the checkpoint were gathered, their bodies lifted into trucks. One was folded into the trunk of a taxi.
Kurdish soldiers raced to the hospital. They passed refugees climbing hillsides toward caves in the ridges. Boys played soccer beneath the barrel of a high-calibre machinegun poking out of a bunker. Two soldiers, their hands bloody, supported a man's cracked skull. The hospital door swung open. The wounded were carried into a room. There were no bright lights. No rubber gloves. No trauma teams.
"Four are hurt. One will die," a doctor said. - (Los Angeles Times)