A suicide truck bomber crashed into the offices of a Kurdish political party yesterday, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens, including the mayor, officials said. It was the second suicide attack in Kurdish areas of the north in four days.
The US military, meanwhile, said an Iraqi interpreter was killed along with four US soldiers in an attack south of Baghdad -- confirming that three missing after the ambush were all US citizens.
Thousands of soldiers were searching the farming area south of the capital for any sign of the missing people.
The attack in Makhmur, 50km south of Irbil, badly damaged the office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Makhmur is not part of the Kurdish-controlled areas but has a substantial Kurdish population.
The blast also killed the police chief and damaged the mayor's office, officials said.
The search for the missing US citizens began after insurgents attacked a patrol of seven US soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter before dawn on Saturday near Mahmoudiya.
The US said on Saturday that five people were dead and three were missing.
US spokesman Major General William Caldwell said the bodies of the three slain soldiers and the Iraqi interpreter had been identified, but the military was still working to identify the fifth.
Mahmoudiya is about 30km south of Baghdad in an al-Qaeda-dominated area known as the "triangle of death."
With violence on the rise, Caldwell also announced that an additional 3,000 forces have been sent to Diyala Province, the scene of heavy fighting.
Last week, the top US commander in the north, Major General Benjamin Mixon, said the US didn't have enough troops to restore order in Diyala but more had been promised.
"There is a recognition clearly that up in Diyala there has been an uptick in the violence," Caldwell said at a news conference in Baghdad.
Yesterday Iraqi gunmen drove into the Diyala capital of Baqubah, pulled two handcuffed men out of the trunk and shot and killed them, police and witnesses said.
"This is the destiny of traitors," the gunmen yelled as they shot their victims.
Elsewhere, gunmen attacked a police station south of Baqubah, killing one officer and wounding four other people, including a 15-year-old girl, police said.
Meanwhile, Iraq's interior ministry has decided to bar news photographers and cameramen from the scenes of bomb attacks, operations director Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said yesterday.
His announcement was the latest in a series of attempts to curtail press coverage of the ongoing conflict, which has already attracted criticism from international human rights bodies.
"We do not want evidence to be disturbed before the arrival of detectives, the ministry must respect human rights and does not want to expose victims and does not want to give terrorists information that they achieved their goals," Khalaf said.
"This decision does not imply a curtailment of press freedom, it is a measure followed all over the world," he said.
Media coverage of Iraq's deadly sectarian conflict generates dozens of images and reports of carnage every day.
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