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Female bomber strikes Iraqi town | |
(about 1 hour later) | |
A female suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives has killed 16 people in a town near Baghdad. | |
At least 20 people were wounded in the blast at 0930 local time (0630 GMT) in Muqdadiya, which is 90km (55 miles) north-east of Iraq's capital. | |
The bomber struck at the office of a local Sunni Arab anti-al-Qaeda militia, killing 10 members of the group. | |
Police say she was a local woman who was once a member of executed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. | |
She was targeting one of the so-called Awakening Councils, militias that have backed US forces and the Iraqi government in their efforts to reclaim Iraqi provinces from al-Qaeda. | |
Fragile security | Fragile security |
A female suicide bomber previously struck at Muqdadiya in April this year, walking into a crowd at a police recruitment centre and killing more than a dozen people. | |
The BBC's Crispin Thorold in Baghdad says Diyala has been the focus of some of the fiercest clashes in Iraq in recent months. | |
Insurgents displaced from their former strongholds in Anbar province and parts of Baghdad are now thought to be in Diyala, says our correspondent. | |
Recent months have seen a sharp and sustained drop in all forms of violence in most parts of Iraq, analysts say. | |
The US troop surge of 30,000 extra troops in and around Baghdad, which started in February, has been credited with this. | |
But senior US commanders in Iraq have warned recent gains could be fragile. | But senior US commanders in Iraq have warned recent gains could be fragile. |