Iraq Says Truck Bomb in North Killed 152

An Iraqi man with his son, who was wounded Saturday
by a blast in Hilla. Bombs also hit two other cities.

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

Published: April 1, 2007

BAGHDAD, March 31 — The Iraqi government on Saturday gave its first official reckoning of the truck bombing Tuesday in the northern city of Tal Afar, putting the death toll at 152 people, a number about double that in early reports.

he bombing, which left 347 other people in a poor Shiite neighborhood wounded, set off a wave of reprisals by Shiite policemen and others that left another 47 people dead and shattered the image of Tal Afar held up by American politicians last year as a model of a turbulent city turned peaceful.

When the bomb detonated, younger Shiite policemen “were motivated by emotions when they saw their parents and siblings getting killed, but this is not acceptable,” Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf said Saturday. He said that 16 policemen and 2 civilians were under arrest and would be fully prosecuted for the reprisals.

Sectarian violence continued around Iraq on Saturday, when 27 people were killed in shootings and car bombings and 10 bodies were found in Baghdad, according to the Interior Ministry. In Gabala, near Hilla, Shiite militiamen killed two people at a Sunni mosque and then burned Sunni stores in retaliation for the killing of the brother of a Mahdi Army militia leader. The Iraqi Army intervened to stop the attack on the mosque, said a member of Scorpion Brigade, a commando unit in Babil Province.

The car bombings were in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad; in Hilla; and in the northern town of Tuzkhormato, south of Kirkuk. Also, eight civilians who worked on an Iraqi Army base in the town of Hawija, in northern Iraq, were shot to death, and in Salahiddin Province, eight policemen were killed.

In the Interior Ministry’s first news conference since the bombing, officials underscored the event’s scale and horror. “It is a very painful attack,” General Khalaf said.

If the death toll of 152 in the Tal Afar attack is correct, it was the highest total from a single bomb in the four-year-old war.

A number of causes may have contributed to the large increase in the reported deaths: some of the wounded later died; some victims were taken to hospitals outside Tal Afar and were not immediately counted; and some bodies were retrieved at the scene by family members, preventing the deaths from being recorded.

The Interior Ministry, which has been accused of bias toward Shiites and of having groups within it associated with Shiite militias and death squads, is now under a new minister, Jawad al-Bolani.

General Khalaf, who runs the Interior Ministry’s National Command Center, which tracks attacks across Iraq, said: “The prime minister and the minister of interior ordered an investigative committee to go to Tal Afar and take the proper steps and bring the guilty to justice. The committee did its work and there are 18 guilty who did kill innocent citizens and they were arrested and will be brought to justice.”

The truck bombing destroyed 100 houses and many shops in the neighborhood, which is a poor district with ramshackle construction, officials said. When the huge bomb went off, little could stand up to it. “When it exploded, it left a 23-meter crater in the ground, and that tells us that it had two tons of explosives,” General Khalaf said.

The city has about 200,000 residents, mostly Turkmen, ethnically related to the people of Turkmenistan in Central Asia. In Tal Afar, the population is split between Sunnis and Shiites, with a somewhat higher proportion of Shiites.

It is a poor area, and the suicide bomber took advantage of the city’s deprivation to lure people to his truck, which carried flour as well as explosives, officials said. The bomber also benefited from mistakes by the soldiers responsible for checking all vehicles entering the city for bombs.

“It was a truck loaded with flour,” General Khalaf said. “They had not gotten flour for some time, and when the truck came in, it was searched hurriedly by the army checkpoint, and the TNT was mixed in with the flour and the electrical circuit was sophisticated. The checkpoint troops did not have enough experience to find it.”

Also Saturday, the justice minister, Hashim al-Shibli, resigned. Mr. Shibli, a member of the secular National Democratic Party, had fallen out of favor with the Iraqi List, a party that had supported his appointment and controls the position.

A government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said that the replacement of Mr. Shibli had already been planned as part of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s reorganization of positions in the ministry.

Khalid Hassan and Hosham Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Hilla and Kirkuk.