US army says Kurdish offices in Kirkuk raided
Kurdish Media

KIRKUK, Iraq, Jan 4 (AFP) - 22h33 - US troops detained an official from the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) during raids also targeting the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the northern city of Kirkuk, a US military spokesman said Sunday.

A PUK office on the southern outskirts of Kirkuk, meanwhile, was hit with a Katyusha rocket late Sunday injuring a guard, police chief General Turhan Yussef told AFP.

It was the first incident of its kind in Kirkuk since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April.

Soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade accompanied by Iraqi police stormed PUK offices Saturday and confiscated one AK-47 assault rifle and five rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), said Sergeant Robert Cargie of the Fourth Infantry Division based in Tikrit.

The PUK’s Kirkuk chief Jalal Jawhar said only branch offices were raided and not the main headquarters.

Cargie said the KDP offices in Kirkuk were raided too and that a senior official from the party was detained. US troops confiscated two RPG launchers, two AK-47s, two 107 millimeter rockets and an assault rifle.

But the head of the KDP in Kirkuk, Najat Hassam Karim, denied any of his party’s members were arrested in the past 24 hours.

Separately a bomb exploded at a bridge 18 kilometers (11 miles) west of Kirkuk destroying telephone lines between the oil city and Mosul further north as well as other towns, according to telecom services director Adel Sadek, adding it would take four days to repair the damage.

A wave of violence has shaken Kirkuk since last Wednesday when four people were killed after PUK militiamen opened fire on a demonstration of Turkmen and Arabs protesting a Kurdish drive to incorporate Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan.

PUK offices were also raided on Wednesday.

That was followed by the stabbing of two Kurds and the shooting of an Arab in clashes with police.

The KDP and PUK, which have ruled the northern provinces of Dohuk, Arbil and Sulaimaniyah since the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, have been key supporters of the US occupation of Iraq.