BAGHDAD: A suicide truck bomber yesterday targeted a police station in Kirkuk, killing at least 13 people and wounding more than 150, including many children from a nearby school, police said.
A US soldier was also among killed in the Kirkuk blast and two others died in volatile Anbar province.
In Kirkuk, the attacker rammed the truck into the concrete blast barriers protecting the back of the compound, detonating his explosives, which were hidden under bags of flour, a police spokesman said.
The bodies of 19 Shia workers, meanwhile, were found from the city's Shorja market. The workers were kidnapped at a fake checkpoint, officials said. Gunmen stormed their minibus as they returned home to the restive northern province of Diyala.
Sunni Arab officials said it was inevitable they would have to fight an all-out battle with Al Qaeda-linked militants in Iraq's Sunni provinces, where a violent power struggle has begun to spill over into Baghdad.
"Facing them is inevitable. If it is not done right now then it will be in the near future, we do not have another choice," said a senior member in the Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament. "It's a difficult decision and violence will increase because they will fight back, but we have to do it."
In another development, prosecutors in Iraq are calling for Saddam Hussein's cousin "Chemical Ali" to be sentenced to death. Ali Hassan Al Majeed and five other defendants face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ali is also charged with genocide.
In Washington, the Pentagon yesterday said it will send another 9,000 US troops to Iraq, with about half of them returning to combat ahead of schedule, in order to maintain troop levels in its new security crackdown through at least August.
Two of the affected Army units, totalling about 4,500 troops, will return to combat short of their promised year at home, reflecting the strain placed on US forces by commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In yet another development, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid yesterday joined one of the chamber's biggest anti-war Democrats in proposing to terminate funding for the conflict in Iraq within a year.
The Senate has already defied a veto threat by the US President George W Bush and joined the House of Representatives in backing a timetable for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq.
But the new legislation unveiled by Wisconsin liberal Democrat Russ Feingold and co-sponsored by Nevada Democrat Reid would go farther and take the controversial step of ending funding for the war by March 31, 2008 - with three exceptions.