BAQUBA, IRAQ/Kobani, Syria // Three suicide car bomb attacks against offices in a Kurdish-controlled Iraqi town killed at least 25 people on Sunday, most of them Kurdish forces veterans volunteering to re-enlist, officials said.
The ISIL militant group claimed responsibiity for the attack via affiliated Twitter accounts, saying the three suicide bombers were from Germany, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
“At 10:30 this morning, three car bombs struck Qara Tapah,” said mayor Wahab Ahmed, who was lightly wounded in the attack.
Qara Tapah lies close to Jalawla, a key battleground north-east of Baghdad between pro-government forces and ISIL.
The mayor said the three car bombs targeted his office, a building used by the Kurds’ asayesh internal security service and an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party.
Mr Ahmed said nearby buildings used by the electricity department and the Kurdish peshmerga forces’ veterans affairs bureau were also seriously damaged in the explosions.
A high-ranking security official in the autonomous Kurdish regional government put the death toll at 27 and said most of the dead were peshmerga veterans who had volunteered to return to active duty to fight IS.
“Twenty-four of the victims are peshmerga veterans,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to talk to the press.
“They had come to join the front against [ISIL]. There are still victims trapped in the debris,” he said.
A local federal army official could confirm 25 deaths.
Twitter accounts affiliated with ISIL relayed a claim naming the three suicide bombers as Abu Sara Al Almani (German), Abu Mohammed Al Jazrawi (Saudi) and Abu Turab Al Turki (Turkey).
Confessionally and ethnically mixed Diyala province, which borders Iran, has seen intense fighting pitting ISIL militants against Iraqi federal troops, and their Kurdish and Shiite militia allies.
In the provincial capital Baquba on Sunday, a roadside bomb blast in a busy neighbourhood called Al Dhabbat killed six civilians, a police captain and a doctor at Baquba hospital said.
It was not immediately clear who the explosion targeted.
Two women and a child were among those killed and several others were among the 10 people also wounded in the blast, the sources said.
A woman was killed and two children wounded when another bomb targeted a policeman’s home in Baquba’s Shifta neighbourhood, the same sources said.
In Syria, ISIL met dogged Kurdish resistance in the high-profile battleground town of Kobani on Sunday but they put Iraqi forces under heavy pressure, prompting the first US-led relief drops.
A roadside bomb killed the police chief of the Iraqi province of Anbar, between Baghdad and the Syrian border, where Pentagon officials have voiced concern about the vulnerability of government troops to a renewed offensive by the militants.
And further north, around the key oil refinery town of Baiji, the Iraqi army and its Sunni Arab tribal allies came under fresh attack by ISIL, prompting a maiden resupply operation by US-led coalition aircraft.
In Kobani, where ISIL is battling Kurdish fighters under the gaze of the international media massed just across the border with Turkey, the militants were taking heavy losses, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
On Saturday alone, the militants lost at least 36 fighters in the battle with Kurdish militiamen for the town, said the Britain-based monitoring group, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria.
Observatory director Abdel Rahman said ISIL was pouring in reinforcements from other areas it controls in Syria, after its Friday capture of the Kurdish command headquarters in Kobani failed to deliver a decisive blow.
“They are sending fighters without much combat experience,” he said.
“They are attacking on multiple fronts but they keep being repulsed, then countering and being pushed back again.”
The United Nations warned on Friday that hundreds of mainly elderly civilians remain in the town centre and thousands more on the outskirts who all risk massacre if the militants cut the sole escape route to the Turkish border.
Washington and its Arab allies have stepped up airstrikes against ISIL targets around Kobani in recent days but Pentagon officials have said there is a limit to what they can do without forces on the ground they can work with.
The Kurdish fighters in Kobani – who have links with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) over the border in Turkey, which is on Washington’s terror blacklist – say they have had no coordination with US commanders.
State department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said Washington was deeply concerned about the humanitarian risks of Kobani’s fall but said it would keep to its overall strategy against ISIL, which prioritises the campaign in neighbouring Iraq.
“We know there’s the threat of serious casualties – that’s why we’re taking strikes in the Kobani area against [ISIL] targets,” said Ms Harf.
“What [ISIL] is doing in Kobani shows just how brutal these terrorists are. But the fight against [ISIL] is a much larger strategic effort than in any one town.”
That strategy has seen Washington and its coalition partners carry out hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq in support of its allies on the ground – Kurdish forces in the north and embattled federal government troops further south.
* Agence France-Press
