Suicide attack kills 15 in Iraq

90 others suffer injuries in blast

— A suicide car bomber joined by other suicide attackers on foot assaulted a provincial police headquarters in a disputed northern Iraqi city Sunday, killing at least 15 people and wounding 90 others, officials said.

The blast in Kirkuk appeared to be a fresh attack by militants seeking to undermine government efforts in maintaining security nationwide.

Two police officers said the car bomber drove his vehicle into the Kirkuk headquarters, after which a second car bomb - parked rather than driven - also went off. Then, two suicide attackers on foot armed with machine guns and grenades tried to break into the station, but were killed before they could enter the building and set off their explosive-rigged belts.

The officers spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to release information. The head of the provincial health directorate, Sidiq Omar Rasool, confirmed the casualty figures.

While there was no immediate claim of responsibility, car bombs and coordinated attacks are favorite tactics for Sunni insurgents such as al-Qaida’s Iraq branch.

The blast damaged the police offices and nearby buildings. Several bodies could be seen on the street along with the debris of the car bomb. Police and rescuers dug in the rubble for survivors.

Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, is home to a mix of Arabs, Kurds andTurkomen, who all have competing claims to the oil-rich area. The Kurds want to incorporate it into their self-ruled region in Iraq’s north, but Arabs and Turkomen are opposed.

The city is at the heart of a snaking swath of territory disputed between the Kurds, who have their own armed fighting force, and Iraq’s central government.

Al-Qaida and other insurgent groups are believed to exploit ethnic tensions throughout Iraq’s north.

Elsewhere on Sunday, an Iraqi telecom company raised nearly $1.3 billion on Baghdad’s small stock exchange in one of the region’s biggest share offers in years - a sign of investor confidence in the fledgling private sector.

The level of violence has dropped sharply since the worst sectarian fighting in 2006-07, yet bombings and shootings still kill dozens of people every month. Investors have said the continued security risks, along with concerns about official red tape and corruption, have restricted the growth of Iraq’s private sector.

Iraq sits on vast oil reserves, and foreign investment has focused heavily on the government-controlled energy sector. So it was good news for the Iraq economy when nearly two-thirds of the money raised by the telecom company came from foreign buyers.

“Iraq is a very difficult place to do business in,” said Shwan Taha, head of Rabee Securities, the brokerage firm that organized Sunday’s share float of Asiacell, one of Iraq’s three main mobile phone service providers. “Iraq came out of a long dictatorship. We had 30 years of war and sanctions. We missed a lot of trains, not only one.”

Iraq is now catching up, he said.

Sunday’s share sale by Asiacell more than doubled the market capitalization of the low-volume Iraq Stock Exchange in a single day, from $4.7 billion to $9.65 billion, said Rabee Securities.

Asiacell had offered a quarter of its shares, or 67.5 billion. The initial share price was set at just under 2 cents. Foreigners bought about 70 percent of the shares and Iraqis bought 30 percent, for a total of $1.24 billion, the brokerage firm said.

Regular trading of the shares is to begin today.

Information for this article was contributed by Karin Laub of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/04/2013

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