IRAQ - July 16 - Attacks In Kirkuk And Diyala Kill More Than 100 Iraqis.

A suicide bomber in the volatile northern city of Kirkuk crashes his truck into a compound that includes offices of a major Kurdish political party, killing 85 people. Many victims were women and children, shopping in the busy market next to the political offices, who were engulfed by a large fireball. Hours later, the Iraqi authorities said, men wearing Iraqi military uniforms stormed into a village in Diyala Province and killed 29 men, women and children. An Iraqi security official, Colonel Ragheb Radhi al-Umiri, said the gunmen surrounded the victims and fired into the crowd. The attack occurred in a remote village north of Baquba, he said, and the bodies of some victims were "desecrated" before the attackers fled. In response to questions, an American military spokesman in Baghdad said via e-mail that American forces had received a report from the Diyala Provincial Joint Coordination Center that men "wearing Iraqi army uniforms attacked Adwala village, killing 29 civilians and wounding four civilians", and that the attackers rode in new Iraqi police trucks. The co-ordination center serves as a clearinghouse for emergency response services in the province. No other information was available about the attack. If the Iraqi authorities' accounts are correct, they suggest that the attackers either were able to steal official Iraqi uniforms and vehicles or that they may have themselves been members of the security forces. The Kirkuk attack was the latest to stoke fears that intensified American military operations in Baghdad may have led insurgents to move their operations to locations that can more easily be attacked. The explosion flung bodies throughout the outdoor market and left some of the 185 people who were wounded shouting wildly for help as they ran through the streets with their clothes and hair on fire, witnesses said. Nine thousand pounds of explosives were used, a senior local police official said, gouging a crater into the ground several yards deep while destroying buildings and scores of shops and cars. One of the buildings, the police said, belonged to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that controls southeastern Kurdistan and whose leader is the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani. There was no report on casualties among party members. A witness, Sherzad Abdullah, was a few hundred yards away when the truck ram into the perimeter of the compound and explode, he said. Stunned and slightly wounded, Abdullah said he watched the fireball "devour the cars passing on the road". One passenger bus burst into flames. "The whole bus was on fire", he said, "and the passengers were jumping up and down inside". It was the single deadliest post-invasion blast in Kirkuk, a city rich in oil and ethnicity. Ambitious and organized Kurds are pushing for the city to join the neighboring Iraqi Kurdish region, while Turkmen and Arabs are trying to prevent a full-scale Kurdish takeover. The enormous payload in the attack was similar to that of a July 7 blast in Amerli, a poor Shi'ite Turkmen village 50 miles south of Kirkuk, that killed dozens of families who were crushed as their fragile clay-walled homes collapsed. No group claimed responsibility for July 16 blast in Kirkuk. But it bore the signs of Sunni Arab extremists and reinforced fears that militants who eluded newly fortified American units closer to Baghdad have turned their lethal focus to places far from the five-brigade troop buildup. The additional troops have been deployed mainly in Baghdad, Diyala and areas just south of the capital, where the Third Infantry Division began an operation to cut insurgent supply lines into Baghdad from sanctuaries in the area. PM Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seemed to acknowledge that the blast could be the work of insurgents who fled central Iraq for easier targets. "The enemy, with his outrageous crimes against civilians, is trying to open the blockade imposed upon him in Baghdad, Diyala and Anbar", Maliki said in a statement, referring to offensives by American-led forces and tribal leaders. The Kirkuk police said the target of the blast was a building housing men from the Kurdish party's intelligence and security branch. But a party official later said that was not true, saying the bomb struck near a building housing a sports committee and another containing a party relief organisation. The bomber rammed his truck into the blast walls of the compound just after noon, as the adjoining street market was flooded with people heading for lunch or midday shopping. Rescue workers frantically dug through the concrete and rubble and rushed those they found still breathing to hospitals. But many were turned away, told there was no more room because of the wounded still recovering from the Amerli bombing, which killed 150 people and wounded several hundred more. Many people wounded were diverted to hospitals in Erbil and Sulaimaniya, the two largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Two more blasts hit Kirkuk later. A bomb in a parked car exploded about a half-mile from the first attack, wounding one person. Another suicide bomber driving a Volkswagen attacked a police patrol in southern Kirkuk, killing one policeman and seriously wounding 10 others, the police said. Ethnic tensions have been on the rise in Kirkuk, 160 miles north of Baghdad. Kurds have aggressively moved into the city since the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, angering Turkmen and Arab residents who feel they are being driven out. The government of Saddam Hussein had resettled many Arabs in the city, but Kurds believe that Kirkuk belongs in the Kurdish region, which has its own security and in many ways operates separately from the rest of Iraq. Meanwhile, two American soldiers died Sunday: one in Diwaniya in southern Iraq, who died from what the American military described as a "non-battle related cause", and another killed by an explosion in Nineveh Province in northern Iraq. In Baghdad, 25 unidentified bodies were found around the city, an Interior Ministry official reported. An improvised bomb also killed five Iraqi soldiers. Mortars killed two people in the city, while a car bomb killed one. Gunmen also killed three policemen south of Falluja, the Iraqi police said.