Arbil: A car bomb exploded in the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan on Wednesday, killing several people in the first big attack there in more than a year.
Details of the attack were unclear but a senior Kurdish civil servant said the explosives-rigged vehicle was driven by a suicide bomber trying to enter the governor’s compound, which is protected by blast walls.
Explosions are a regular occurrence in the federal capital Baghdad and other cities outside Kurdistan but the autonomous region has largely managed to insulate itself from the violence convulsing the rest of the country.
Daesh militants who overran swathes of northern Iraq this summer have repeatedly threatened to launch attacks against the Kurds, who are fighting them along a front line stretching more than 1,000 km (600 miles).
Footage from the scene in Arbil showed charred vehicles and blood smeared on the cobbles outside the governor’s office in the centre of Arbil. Windows on the opposite side of the street had been shattered by the force of the blast.
A witness interviewed live on Kurdistan TV said two policemen and two civilians had been killed in the explosion.
The United States launched air strikes in Iraq this August when Daesh militants advanced on Arbil, where many expatriates, including oil industry and aid workers, are based.
Since then, the region’s peshmerga forces have regained ground from Daesh, emerging as the West’s most trusted and effective partner on the ground in their war against the the militants. But the Kurdistan region’s President Masoud Barzani on Wednesday said the peshmerga needed heavier weapons from the international coalition to deliver a decisive blow to Islamic State.
The last major attack in Arbil was more than one year ago, when militants launched a coordinated suicide and car bomb attack on the headquarters of the security services. Another blast took place in August, but there were no casualties.
