A woman wearing a vest packed with explosives killed 16 people and a suicide car bomb killed 10 in Iraq today, in attacks aimed at units helping US forces fight al-Qaeda.
Police said 27 people were wounded in the first attack, when the female suicide bomber struck at former Sunni Arab insurgents who have switched sides to join US-backed security forces battling al-Qaeda.
A security source said the female bomber had three adult children who had been killed in operations by Iraqi forces. The car bomb killed seven Iraqi troops and three members of a local neighbourhood patrol. Eight people were hurt.
Both strikes took place in religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala, Iraq's most violent province, where US forces say al-Qaeda gunmen are regrouping after being pushed from other areas.
Police said the female bomber targeted a building used by members of the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades in the town of Muqdadiya, 90 km northeast of Baghdad. The Brigades were once one of the main groups of Sunni Arab insurgents fighting US forces and the Shia-led government, but in recent months many members have begun working alongside security forces against Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.
Witnesses said a woman walked up to the building, in a street full of shops, and began asking questions. She detonated the vest she was wearing when people out shopping before Friday prayers began gathering around her.
"We saw several bodies. It is Friday and the area was crowded," Ammar Fadhel, a 35-year-old labourer, said. The US military put the death toll at 12, with 18 wounded. All were civilians, it said.
Police put the toll at 16 and said women and children were among the casualties. In the second attack, a suicide car bomber struck a checkpoint in the village of Dali Abbas which, like Muqdadiya, is just north of Diyala's provincial capital Baquba.
A build-up of 30,000 extra US troops this year and the rise of neighbourhood security patrols organised by mainly Sunni Arab sheikhs have helped reduce violence in Iraq.
US forces say the security crackdown has squeezed al-Qaeda out of former strongholds like western Anbar province into other areas north of Baghdad like Diyala, making the north the new focus of the fight against al-Qaeda. At least 61 people have been killed and about 90 wounded in Diyala province in the past week in five major bombing and shooting attacks. While overall US troop numbers have started to fall in Iraq, force levels are increasing in Diyala.