Planners and Accomplices of Erbil Bombing Arrested
“The perpetrators aimed at infiltrating the Asayish (security) headquarters by using two car bombs, following which two armed suicide bombers planned to exploit the security vacuum created by the car explosions,” the council said in a statement.
The assault, in which all six attackers and seven Kurdish security guards were killed and 40 others wounded, was the first such act in Erbil since a 2007 strike on the same target.
Last month’s attack has been claimed by al-Qaeda’s Iraq wing, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
In a claim posted Sunday on the Honein jihadist forum, it said, “The attack was a response for the support by the Kurdistan Region’s President Massoud Barzani for the government in Baghdad and for the Kurdish forces fighting jihadists in Syria.”
The statement by the KNSC, which oversees the security, military and intelligence services, said that the accomplices had confessed to assisting in the attack, but gave no other details about the detainees. It promised full details soon.
As the rest of Iraq has been drowning in sectarian violence since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein by US-led forces, the autonomous Kurdistan Region in the north has remained the country’s only peaceful oasis.
The three-province self-rule enclave is home to a predominantly ethnic Kurdish population. But it has also provided shelter to thousands of Arabs and Christians fleeing violence in other parts of Iraq.
More recently, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has provided sanctuary to some 250,000 mostly Kurdish-Syrian refugees fleeing the war next door.
Authorities say that over the past year security forces have thwarted multiple attacks by jihadi groups, whose goal is to export their extremist ideology into Kurdistan, praised internationally as the region’s only successful experiment in democracy.
The energy-rich enclave, which has its own government, legislature and constitution, is in the midst of an economic boom, attracting nearly every international oil major and airlines from Europe and the Gulf reporting record passenger growth on flights to Erbil.
RUDAW
