22 dead in Baghdad suicide bomb attack

A suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives in an outdoor market today, killing at least 22 people and wounding at least 50 others in a village of Shiite ethnic Turkomen north of Baghdad, police said.

Hours earlier, a suicide car bomber struck outside a café on Friday night in a tiny Shiite Kurdish village near the Iranian border north-east of the capital, killing 26 people and wounding at least 33, police said.

The two attacks suggest that Sunni militants are regrouping to launch their deadliest form of attack - car bombings, often against Shiites - in regions further away from Baghdad, beyond the edges of a three-week old US offensive on the capital's northern flank.

The offensive around the city of Baqouba, 35 miles north-east of Baghdad, is part of a stepped-up US crackdown seeking to bring calm to the capital.

It aims to uproot al-Qaida fighters and other Sunni insurgents who use the Baqouba region - and another on Baghdad's south-eastern edges - as a staging ground for attacks in the capital.

Today's blast, at about 8.30am local time, destroyed several mud homes in the village of Armili, and victims had to be transported in farmers' trucks to the nearest health facility, in Tuz Khormato, 27 miles to the north, said Capt. Soran Ali of the Tuz Khormato police.

Saleh Ali, a medic at Tuz Khormato hospital, said 22 people were killed and 50 wounded.

The village, 100 miles north of Baghdad is mainly made up of Shiite Turkomen, an ethnic minority that is spread across north-central Iraq, though most of its members are Sunni Muslim.

In the Friday evening attack, a suicide bomber detonated a boobytrapped car outside a cafe near a market stocking Iranian goods in the village of Ahmad Marif, killing 26 and wounding 33, said an official at the joint security co-ordination committee of Diyala province.

The village is home to about 30 Kurdish families who had been expelled under Saddam Hussein's rule and returned after his fall. Many Kurds in the area are Shiite Muslims.

In the far south of Iraq, British troops came under heavy attack by militants in Basra, causing a number of casualties, the British military said today.

The troops were hit by bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms during an arrest operation in the city before dawn, the military said in a statement. Coalition aircraft destroyed roadside bombs as the British soldiers were extracted from the city, it said.

A British military spokesman refused to say how many soldiers were wounded.