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At least 38 killed in Iraq bombings

AFP - Friday, June 27

RAMADI, Iraq (AFP) - - At least 38 people were killed in two massive bomb attacks in Iraq Thursday, 20 of them dying at the hands of a suicide bomber as they held an anti-Qaeda meet, officials said.

The bomber blew himself up in a municipal office in western Iraq's Anbar province, killing the local mayor and at least 19 senior members of an anti-Qaeda front, according to Iraqi officials.

The attack, in which more than 20 people were also wounded, took place in the town of Garma, near the former Sunni rebel bastion of Fallujah, the Fallujah town council spokesman Kamal al-Ayash told AFP.

Ayash said the bomber detonated his explosive vest in the office of mayor Kamal al-Abdali as he was huddled in a meeting with members of an anti-Qaeda "Awakening" group around noon (0900 GMT).

"Abdali was one of those killed in the attack," Ayash said.

A security official in the defence ministry confirmed that at least 20 people were killed and 20 more were wounded in the attack.

The bombing marked the second attack on a municipal office in Iraq this week.

On Tuesday, the office of the district advisory council of Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City was bombed in an attack which killed four Americans -- two soldiers and two civilian employees.

The violence in Garma came just days before Anbar province, once a hotbed of Sunni militancy, was due to be transferred by the US military to the control of Iraqi security forces.

The country's largest province was the epicentre of a brutal Sunni Arab-led fight against the US military after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.

In the early years of the insurgency, US forces fought raging battles in the province, especially in the capital Ramadi and in Fallujah.

Fallujah became a symbol of the ultra-violent insurgency before it was virtually razed to the ground in November 2004 by a US military assault launched to seize control of the city.

The violence Anbar began to ebb in late 2006 when local Sunni tribes, weary of Al-Qaeda's extremism and brutal methods, switched allegiance and formed a common front to chase them out.

The front became known as Sahwa or "Awakening". Most of its members are former Sunni Arab insurgents who fought US forces after the fall of Saddam.

But since they sided with the US troops in late 2006, violence has fallen dramatically in Anbar, making the province a symbol of stability in Iraq.

A car bomb, meanwhile, ripped through northern Iraq's restive city of Mosul, killing 18, Iraqi and US officials said.

The US military said initial reports indicated that 17 Iraqi civilians and a policeman were killed, while 71 civilians and nine policemen were wounded in the car bomb attack.

An Iraqi police officer, who asked he not to be named, said insurgents first fired several rockets into the Bab al-Tob market in the centre of Mosul at around 1:00 pm (1000 GMT).

Provincial governor Duraid Mohammed Kashmula then toured the market to assess the damage when a car bomb exploded in the vicinity.

Kashmula survived the bombing, the officer added.

US commanders have said that Iraq's third largest city is the country's last urban bastion of Al-Qaeda. Iraqi troops backed by the US military launched a major offensive on May 14 to chase the jihadists out.

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