In spite of the bombing in Arbil: „The northern Iraqi province of Kurdistan is safe”

„In spite of the dreadful bombing today in our town Kurdistan is the safest region in the whole land”, said the spokesperson of the Kurdistan/Iraq section of the Society for Threatened Peoples, Yousif Dzayi from Arbil on Wednesday following the blowing up of a lorry in front of the Ministry of the Interior of the northern Iraqi federal province. „While dozens of people are killed every day in Baghdad and the residents must be prepared for dreadful attacks at any time, in our capital city there have been since 2003 only four bombings of this kind.”

In today’s explosion in Arbil at least 13 people were killed and 40 injured, some of them very seriously, reported Dzayi. It appears that the explosives were hidden in the lorry under a delivery of shampoo.

The GfbV has had a branch in Kurdistan/Iraq since the summer of 2006. The office of the international human rights organisation is in Arbil. The advisory committee of this GfbV section is made up of 20 persons from public life of all ethnic groups in north Iraq. Among them are Kurdish, Assyro-Chaldaic, Turkmen and Yezidi members of Parliament, the deputy President of Parliament, a Christian minister, representatives of the smaller ethnic groups and religious minorities, the chair of the Kurdish Women’s Union, Islamic, Christian and Yezidi clerics and well-known figures from the worlds of science and culture. The victims’ associations of Kurdistan, among them the society of former political prisoners, who had to suffer in their tens of thousand in the camps of Saddam Hussein, are represented on the advisory committee like the women from the Barzan area, who are mourning the abduction and shooting of 8,000 of their sons and husbands.