A suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives in the crowded outdoor market of a Shiite farming town north of Baghdad today, levelling houses and stores and killing more than 100 people, officials said.

Gunmen killed two relatives of a senior Kurdish official and 14 others died in a string of bombings and shootings overnight and today, shattering three days of relative calm that followed the country’s first election for a full-term parliament.

A roadside bomb today in northern Iraq killed six Iraqi soldiers and wounded two others, Iraqi officials said.

Two US military police were slightly injured today in a blast outside a US Army base, witnesses said.