105 Iraqis killed in suicide attack: nine US troops killed

A suicide truck bomber ripped the heart out of a northern Iraqi village on Saturday, killing at least 105 people and demolishing dozens of homes and shops, police and medics said. Ambulances and private cars ferried dozens of bloodied corpses and wounded civilians to clinics in the nearby town of Tuz Khurmatu and the provincial capital Kirkuk, where desperate relatives waited for news of the missing.
Officials were stunned by the scale of the blast, which devastated the main market in Emerli, a small rural community of people from Iraq's Shiite Turkmen minority living in an area notorious for al Qaeda militants.
"I heard the cries of my child, then I heard nothing else until I woke in hospital," sobbed middle-aged housewife Sukaina Abdul Razak, whose clay brick home collapsed when the blast ripped through the village. "I don't know the fate of my husband and my family. They were all in the kitchen, but I was in my room," she told AFP, as she was treated for head injuries in Kirkuk's overcrowded emergency room.
Shrapnel from the blast killed shoppers hundreds of metres (yards) from its epicentre, wounded grocer Hussein Abu Al-Hussein Akbar Aziz said in Kirkuk. "We have never seen an attack like that in Emerli. The whole village was shrouded in smoke and dust," he said, grimacing from a leg injury. "I was serving a woman and her child in my shop. They were both killed."
Lieutenant Colonel Saman Hamid, commander of the security co-ordination centre in nearby Tuz Khurmatu, told AFP: "105 Iraqis were killed and five are missing, we have registered their names. There are more than 250 wounded."
The casualty toll was confirmed by Dr Wissam Abdullah, Director of the main local hospital, who said the wounded had been taken to at least six emergency rooms up to 100 kilometres (60 miles) away around the region. The chief local civilian administrator, Hamad Rasheed, said he had seen reports that up to 125 people could be confirmed dead after rescuers finish digging through the rubble of dozens of buildings.