Suicide bomber kills at least 19 in Iraq

A suicide truck bomberstruck a residential area of a Kurdish village in northern Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 19 people and injuring 30, officials said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for thebombing, but it bore the hallmarks of al-Qaedaand other Sunni insurgents who remain active in Mosul and surrounding areas.

A police officer and health official in Mosul said the bomb went off around 12:30 a.m. local time in the village of Wardek, about 55 kilometres southeast of the city a region where U.S. commanders have warned that insurgents appear to be trying to stoke an Arab-Kurdish conflict.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Reports of the toll of the blast vary, with at least one news agency reporting at least 22 people were killed and 45 wounded.

About 250 families live in the village of simple mud-brick houses, scores of which were turned to rubble, while others had caved-in roofs and windows blown out. Many of the victims were women and children, officials said.

The casualty toll was expected to rise because many people are still missing in the rubble, the officials said.

Remote villages targeted

Local security forces intercepted a second suicide truck bomber, killing the driver and defusing the bomb before it could be detonated, they said.

"I'm certain that we were targeted by al-Qaeda extremists, as they consider us renegades," said residentHaso Narmo, whose house was partially destroyed in the blast.

Insurgents in northern Iraq, who have maintained a stronghold in the city of Mosul, have frequently targeted remote villages and towns that depend on small security forces for protection.

The violence that continues to plague Iraq's north and the capital has forced the government in Baghdad to acknowledge gaps in security.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have identified the split between Iraq's majority Arabs and the Kurdish minority as a greater long-term threat to Iraq's stability than the Sunni-Shia conflict.

"The ongoing terrorist and criminal acts in Ninevah are aimed again at the Kurds, Turkomen, Shias and Yizidis they are ethnic-cleansing operations in which hundreds of innocent people have been killed," Abdul-Muhsin al-Saadoun, a Kurdistan Alliance legislator, said at a press conference in Baghdad.

At the heart of the dispute is the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as well as villages in Ninevah province like Wardek that the Kurds want to incorporate into their semiautonomous area despite opposition from Arabs and the minority Turkomen ethnic group.