Bomber kills 22 in Iraq

A suicide bombing claimed by Sunni Arab insurgents killed 22 people and wounded more than 80 yesterday in the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk, where ethnic tensions are running high between Arabs and Kurds.

The blast came as a former guerilla leader was being sworn in as first President of the Kurds' autonomous region, just to the north. The event has wide implications for the structure of the new Iraqi state. Masoud Barzani, who wants Kirkuk for his capital, told fellow Kurds he aimed to expand their territory.

The Army of Ansar al-Sunna, in an internet statement, said its bomber's target was off-duty Kurdish and Shi'ite Arab soldiers lining up for their pay at a bank near a busy downtown market - though police and bank staff questioned that account.

Witnesses said a man wearing a bulky belt blew himself up in the market near the bank, leaving a scene of devastation. The bank manager denied he was dealing with soldiers. A doctor at Kirkuk hospital said 22 people were killed and 85 wounded.

The city is a focus of territorial ambitions for Kurds and Arabs as well as Turkish-speaking Turkmen, who have competing historical claims and argue over their demographic weights.

The Ansar al-Sunna statement accused Kurdish peshmerga militias and Shi'ites who dominate the security forces of the Shi'ite-led government of killing Sunnis.

The attack occurred a few hours before Mr Barzani, a veteran of guerilla wars against Saddam Hussein and fellow Kurds, was sworn in to the post of elected President at a ceremony at the Parliament in Arbil, 75 km, north of Kirkuk. Leading Iraqi and US embassy officials from Baghdad attended, including Mr Barzani's former rival in a Kurdish civil war of the mid-1990s, new Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

"We must solve the issue of Kirkuk," Mr Barzani, sporting his trademark red-checkered headdress, told the assembly.

He said this should be done in line with the US-sponsored transitional law which makes a special case of the city, which lies just outside the present Kurdish autonomous region, and sets measures for negotiating how it will be governed.

The present Kurdish region is an amalgamation of three of Iraq's 18 provinces which became virtually independent after the US air force helped the peshmerga keep Saddam's forces at bay in the wake of his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War.

Mr Barzani also renewed Kurdish claims to parts of other provinces, which may irk his neighbours: "All these areas must return to the region because it is the Kurds' land."

The Kurds' demands for a federal Iraq, enshrined in the US-sponsored interim laws, pose one of the major challenges for leaders drawing up a new Constitution.

Talabani highlighted the looming debate by praising the Kurdish model: "Every group of three provinces has the right to form a region if the majority accepts that," he said in Arbil.

"The experience in Kurdistan is appropriate as a model."

Negotiations on the Constitution - supposed to culminate in a referendum in October - are taking place amid extreme violence, mostly among Saddam's once dominant Sunni minority.

Near Baquba, northwest of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed five Iraqi soldiers when he attacked a patrol in Kenaan, 20 kilometres east of the town, yesterday, police said.

Insurgents also fired mortars at Kenaan police station, setting it ablaze, police said. Ansar al-Sunna also claimed responsibility for that attack.

Iraqi police discovered two dozen bodies, including 17 employees of an Iraqi security firm, dumped west of Baghdad, the latest in a trail of victims found in the area of late. Sources said they were security guards or engineers.

Three women were killed in a suicide car bomb attack on a military checkpoint at Ramadi, hospital officials said.

The US military reported that three US soldiers were killed, two in a roadside bomb explosion on Monday at Ramadi and one in a rocket attack in Baghdad yesterday.