Insurgents unleashed a wave of deadly bomb attacks in Iraq's ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk today, including a huge suicide truck bomb, a day after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki urged Iraqis to embrace reconciliation.
The crater left by a suicide truck bomb attack outside the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the political party of Iraq's President Jalal Talabani in Kirkuk
At least 23 people were killed and 73 were wounded after coordinated blasts by a truck bomb and four car bombs which rocked oil-rich Kirkuk, a flashpoint city north of Baghdad disputed by Sunni Arabs, ethnic Kurds and Turks.
In the deadliest explosion, a suicide attacker driving a truck rigged with explosives blew himself up outside a police centre and the offices of two top Kurdish parties, killing 17 people, mostly civilians, police said.
The toll included ten women and two children visiting relatives held by police. Within an hour, a car bomb targeting a US military patrol killed three Iraqi civilians and wounded six.
Minutes later, a suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle against an Iraqi army checkpoint, wounding two soldiers, police said. Two other car bombers struck later in the day.
The suicide truck bomb was aimed at the police centre. The closed-off area also houses local headquarters of the two main Kurdish political parties, those of Iraq's President Jalal Talabani and Kurdish regional president Massoud Barzani.
The blast caused massive damage, with firefighters battling flames at collapsed buildings.
Charred and mangled corpses lay in the streets with scattered bits of flesh and twisted car parts. Witnesses said the driver fired a pistol from the truck at the Kurdish guards before he blew himself up.
Settling Kirkuk's final status among ethnic groups is one of postwar Iraq's most sensitive issues, and failure to contain violence there could spark all-out war across Iraq.
In the capital, Baghdad police found 24 more victims of sectarian death squads in the past 24 hours, all of them bound, bearing signs of torture and with a single gunshot to the head, bringing to more than 200 the number of bodies in five days.
Shifting the security emphasis to the embattled capital, US and Iraqi security forces have launched a month-long crackdown in the city of seven million, which American commanders say is key to securing the rest of the country.
US and Iraqi officials say sectarian violence between majority Muslim Shias and Sunnis is a greater threat to Iraq's survival than the three-year-old Sunni Arab insurgency US-led forces have been fighting mainly in the west and north.
But ethnic tensions over Kirkuk between Arabs and Kurds - already high after Barzani banned the use of the Iraqi flag in Kurdistan - is another potential flashpoint that could push Iraq into all-out war and break up the country.