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| Cheney arrives in Iraqi capital | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| US Vice-President Dick Cheney has arrived in Iraq's capital Baghdad, amid an ongoing drive by the US military to contain spiralling violence. | |
| After a briefing by US officials and generals, Mr Cheney is expected to meet Iraqi leaders and urge them to work harder to heal political divisions. | |
| A truck bomb has meanwhile killed at least 12 people in Irbil, in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region. | |
| The bombings that have plagued other parts of Iraq remain rare in Kurdistan. | |
| Television pictures showed the blast had destroyed a building and left a large crater on a road where interior ministry offices are located. | Television pictures showed the blast had destroyed a building and left a large crater on a road where interior ministry offices are located. |
| A witness quoted by Reuters news agency spoke of "fire coming out from the blast area. A man was burned to death." | |
| A security official, First Lt Mariwan Kareem, told the agency the explosives in the truck had been hidden under kitchen cleaning products. | |
| The blast took place at 0800 local time. | |
| The near-daily bombings and instability that have gripped much of Iraq have been largely absent from the northern region, but political tensions are rising over the drafting of a bill that will redistribute oil wealth among the country's Kurdish, Sunni and Shia population. | |
| Most of Iraq's oil is concentrated around the Kurdish north and Shia south. | |
| Irbil last saw a major attack in May 2005, when the offices of a local political party were hit by a suicide bomber. |