BAGHDAD (AFP) — A suicide bomber killed at least 21 people and wounded 32 when he attacked a dinner banquet attended by police and members of an anti-Qaeda Awakening group near Baghdad Sunday, a security official said.
The bomber blew up his explosives-laden vest as police and members of the Sunni Awakening group sat down to dinner in the Abu Ghraib district, about 30 kilometres (20 miles) west of Baghdad, the interior ministry official said.
Aziz Moklif Ghatha al-Zubai, one of the local chiefs of Awakening group who organised the dinner in the district's Al-Zaidan village, was killed in the attack that took place at around 8:30 pm (1730 GMT).
Witnesses said that police had cordoned off the area as victims were taken to a hospital in Fallujah, 20 kilometres (15 miles) west of the city.
They said the village of Al-Zaidan was a former Al-Qaeda stronghold.
Awakening groups began in the western province of Anbar when Sunni tribal leaders turned on their former Al-Qaeda allies in 2006.
Since then hundreds of such groups have sprung up across Iraq, supported and paid for by the US military.
Al-Qaeda has frequently warned that members of Awakening groups will be specially targeted because of their cooperation with the US military in fighting the jihadists.
In other violence in Iraq on Sunday, three bomb attacks and a shootout claimed the lives of nine people and wounded more than two dozen, security officials said.
The bloodletting comes about a week before the start of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, when violence tends to spike in Iraq.
Four Iraqi soldiers were killed and eight others were wounded when a roadside bomb blasted their patrol in the town of Bala Druz, near the restive city of Baquba which has long struggled against Al-Qaeda.
In Baquba itself, two policemen were killed and six others including a woman were wounded in a shootout when insurgents fired at a police patrol, a defence ministry official said.
Earlier this month Iraqi forces backed by US troops launched a massive assault against insurgents and jihadists in Diyala, the province surrounding Baquba and one of Iraq's most dangerous areas where Al-Qaeda fighters regularly launch attacks.
Up to three people were killed and eight wounded, including five policemen, when a bomb targeting a patrol exploded on a through-road leading to Iraq's interior ministry in Baghdad, security officials said.
As police ran to the scene to help, a second bomb went off, wounding another five officers, they said.
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