Three suicide car bombings killed 17 people in northern Iraq today.
At least 10 people were killed and 40 wounded in a massive explosion targeting a restaurant at 8 a.m. in Tuz Khormato, 55 miles south of the northern city of Kirkuk.
The suicide bombing tore apart the town's Baghdad Restaurant, where bodyguards of Iraq's Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, were eating.
Mr Shaways was not at the restaurant at the time of the blast, which killed 10 diners, including one of his guards. Kurds, who want oil-rich Kirkuk to be part of their autonomous Kurdistan region, have been regularly targeted by insurgent attacks.
Elsewhere, in the northern city of Kirkuk, a suicide car bomber apparently targeting two US consulate vehicles killed three Iraqi bystanders and wounded 10 others Thursday.
Further south in Baqouba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, another suicide bomber killed four people, including Hussein Alwan al-Tamimi, deputy head of Iraq's northeastern Diyala provincial council. Three of his bodyguards also died in the attack on his convoy.
A US soldier was killed when a roadside bomb struck the vehicle he was travelling in yesterday near the volatile western Iraqi city of Ramadi, the military said today.