Kurds demand security after bomb kills 19 in Iraq

BAGHDAD -- Kurdish lawmakers demanded the government step up security in northern Iraq after a suicide truck bomb flattened a neighborhood in a small village yesterday, killing 19 people and injuring 30 others.

Two suicide truck bombers targeted the Shiite Kurdish village of Wardek, about 35 miles southeast of Mosul, just after midnight.

Local security forces fired on the driver of one truck when he refused to stop, but he still was able to detonate his bomb. The second assailant in the other explosives-laden truck was shot and killed before his bomb exploded, according to local officials and villagers.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, but it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents who remain active in Mosul and surrounding areas in Ninevah province -- a region where U.S. commanders have warned that insurgents appear to be trying to stoke an Arab-Kurdish conflict.

It follows several other deadly bombings in small villages of ethnic and religious minorities, indicating that insurgents are seeking out relatively undefended targets to maximize casualties as the strapped Iraqi army focuses its efforts on more central areas. Members of Iraqi minority groups are bearing the brunt of the violence.

The American ambassador to Iraq told Congress yesterday that despite a recent rash of insurgent attacks, the U.S. is on track to remove all its combat forces by next August.

"We are holding to this timetable," Christopher Hill told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his first congressional testimony since he took over the top U.S. diplomatic post in Baghdad in April.

The envoy faced skepticism, however, from lawmakers concerned that despite a general downward trend in violence, Iraqi forces may not be ready next year to maintain security amid declining U.S. support.

Hill said he is encouraged that the recent violence, including dual bombings of the Iraqi finance and foreign ministries Aug. 19 that killed about 100 people, has failed to push Iraq back to the brink of civil war.

One reason, Hill said, is that Iraqi security forces have progressed so far in professional development that they are seen by ordinary Iraqis as being committed to "play it fair, and they do their jobs."