BAGHDAD – A suicide bomber detonated explosives among a group of men seeking police jobs yesterday, killing 16 people crowded around a recruiting station in northwestern Iraq.
The blast in Sinjar, about 75 miles west of Mosul, occurred about three weeks after U.S. and Iraqi forces launched an offensive to drive al-Qaeda in Iraq out of Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq and the terror movement's last major urban stronghold.
No group claimed responsibility for the blast, but suicide operations are the signature attack of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The mayor of Sinjar, Dakhil Qassim, said security services had received tips that police-recruiting centers in the area would be targeted and had issued a warning the day before urging people to stay away from them.
But jobs in the police and army are so prized in parts of the country where unemployment runs high that a large crowd of desperate job-seekers showed up anyway, hoping to be accepted as recruits, Qassim said.
The dead included 14 would-be recruits and two policemen, Qassim said. Fourteen people were wounded.
The Interior Ministry said the station commander had been fired for failing to protect the volunteers.
Sinjar is dominated by Yazidis, a small Kurdish-speaking sect whose members are considered to be blasphemers by Muslim extremists.
The U.S. military blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq for the Aug. 14 bombings that devastated nearby villages and killed some 500 people.
The Sinjar bombing was among a string of attacks yesterday against Iraqi security forces, most of which appeared to be the work of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In Ouja, a town near Tikrit where Saddam Hussein is buried, gunmen hiding in a water tanker opened fire on police and pro-U.S. Sunni fighters at a checkpoint, police said.
Security forces returned fire, killing a dozen gunmen. The driver blew himself up with an explosive belt, police said.
To the north, a suicide bomber driving what appeared to be a police vehicle blasted Iraqi commandos in Mosul, killing three troopers and wounding nine other people, said battalion commander Capt. Aziz Latif.
In Baghdad, assailants hurled grenades at a minibus carrying Iraqi army recruits, killing two men and wounding five other people, including a woman bystander, a policeman said.
