IRAQ: BOMBS KILLED nearly 38 people in Iraq yesterday, including 20 at a tribal council meeting in Anbar province just days before the US military transfers control of security for the vast western region to Iraqi forces. The US military said there were also American casualties in the attack in Anbar but gave no details.
In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb on a crowded street killed 18 people and wounded 80 near the office of the governor of surrounding Nineveh province, US forces said.
Nineveh governor Duraid Kashmula had just left his office to investigate damage caused by two rocket-propelled grenades when the car bomb went off. The governor was unhurt. Officials said the bomb may have been an assassination attempt.
Dramatic television pictures showed the bomb exploding near an old woman on the side of a street. A hail of gunfire burst out as security guards opened fire.
Violence in Iraq fell to a four-year low last month, but there has been a spate of attacks in the past week, especially in and around Mosul, which the US military has called Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda's last major urban stronghold in Iraq.
The attacks suggest al-Qaeda, though significantly weakened after a wave of US offensives in the past year, is not yet a spent force. A US military spokesman said the Mosul attack fitted a pattern of al- Qaeda attacking Iraqis and Iraqi security forces.
The American military said al-Qaeda was probably behind the suicide bombing against US-backed Sunni Arab tribal leaders in the Anbar town of Garma, 30km (20 miles) northwest of Baghdad.
A police spokesman in the nearby city of Falluja said 20 people had been killed and 12 wounded.
A tribal leader, Mizher Mshawih, and the head of the district council, Kamal Abdul-Salam, were among those killed, he said, as well as three policemen.
Anbar was once the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency against US forces and an al-Qaeda haven. In late 2006, Sunni Arab tribal leaders joined with US forces to expel the group. Many al-Qaeda fighters fled north, to provinces such as Nineveh.
Violence in Anbar has fallen so sharply that the province is scheduled to become the first Sunni Arab province to be transferred to Iraqi security control on Saturday.
It will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control. The previous nine have been Kurdish or Shia.
A US military source in Anbar said there were no plans to postpone the handover. "We still have people planning for the event . . . right now, there is no change," he said. - (Reuters)