The New Nation - Internet Edition

Reuters, Baghdad

Bombs killed at least 40 people in Iraq on Thursday, including 20 at a tribal council meeting in Anbar province just days before the U.S. military transfers control of security for the vast western region to Iraqi forces.

The U.S. military said three Marines and two interpreters were among the dead in Anbar. That took to 11 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq this week.

In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb on a crowded street killed 18 people and wounded 80 near the office of the governor of surrounding Nineveh province, U.S. forces said. Nineveh Governor Duraid Kashmula had just left his office to investigate damage caused by two rocket-propelled grenades when the car bomb went off. The governor was unhurt. Officials said the bomb may have been an assassination attempt. Dramatic television pictures showed the bomb exploding near an old woman on the side of a street. A hail of gunfire burst out as security guards opened fire.

Violence in Iraq fell to a four-year low last month, but there has been a spate of attacks in the past week, especially in and around Mosul, which the U.S. military has called Sunni Islamist al Qaeda's last major urban stronghold in Iraq.

The attacks suggest al Qaeda, significantly weakened after a wave of U.S. offensives in the past year, is not a spent force. A U.S. military spokesman said the Mosul attack fitted a pattern of al Qaeda attacking Iraqis and Iraqi security forces.

The American military said al Qaeda was likely behind the suicide bombing against U.S.-backed Sunni Arab tribal leaders in the Anbar town of Garma, 30 km (20 miles) northwest of Baghdad. A police spokesman in the nearby city of Falluja said 20 people had been killed and 12 wounded.

AP report adds: Iraq's Higher Judicial Council says a senior judge has been assassinated while he was headed home in Baghdad.

Spokesman Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar says masked drive-by shooters shot and killed Judge Kamil al-Showaili Thursday afternoon on eastern Baghdad's Canal Highway.

Bayrkdar says al-Showaili was the head of one of Baghdad's two appeals courts. The spokesman has not identified any particular group as responsible for the slaying.