A suicide bomber blew himself up among a group of Iraqi army recruits in northern Iraq today, killing 25 people and wounding 35, as Sunni Muslims protested in Baghdad against alleged government torture.
The US military said the blast killed 10 Iraqi civilians and wounded 20.
Police said the attack occurred outside a municipal building in Rabia, northwest of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city and a focus of an 18-month-old insurgent campaign against Iraqi security forces.
The al-Qaeda group in Iraq said in an Internet statement it carried out the attack. "A lion in a martyrdom brigade of al-Qaeda in Iraq carried out a heroic operation in Rabia with an explosive belt. He entered a centre of National Guard volunteers, shouted 'there is no god but God', then exploded,"
said the statement posted on an Islamist site often used by militants in Iraq. It was not possible to authenticate the claim.
Separately, American and Iraqi forces killed nine guerrillas, five of them Syrians, in a small village northwest of the capital, a US military statement said.
The guerrillas had fired rocket-propelled grenades and small arms at a joint US and Iraqi patrol, prompting US forces to respond with an air strike, the statement said.
US and Iraqi forces are struggling to contain a Sunni Arab-led insurgency bent on toppling the Shi'ite-led government. The insurgents, made up of foreign fighters, religious militants and loyalists of toppled leader Saddam Hussein, have kept up a relentless campaign of suicide bombings, shootings and assassinations that have killed thousands of people.
Hours after the blast in Rabia, a car bomb intended for a police patrol killed two Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, police said.
A car bomb attack on a US military patrol in Mosul killed a child and wounded 11 civilians, police said. Witnesses said the car bomb targeted a man selling alcohol on a cart.
Islamic militants have previously attacked sellers of alcohol, which is banned under Islam.