Suicide bomber kills at least 11 and wounds 21 in Iraq’s Anbar province
A suicide bomber killed at least 11 people and wounded 21 others on Thursday in Iraq’s increasingly turbulent western Anbar province, a senior Iraqi army official and police said.


The blast comes weeks before a March 7 parliamentary vote that al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq has threatened to derail by military means, stoking fears of more violence to come as politicians and candidates gear up for the election. A restaurant worker in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, said that bodies littered the scene, close to a complex housing provincial government buildings. Blood stained the ground, and gutted police and army vehicles smouldered nearby. “A suicide bomber ... attacked the checkpoint of the police and army close to our restaurant. Some of them were killed. I saw around five or six bodies, and helped carry them to cars going to hospital,” worker Hamid Ali said. Once a safe-haven for Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda, the mainly Sunni province had been relatively calm after tribal leaders turned on militants there from late 2006 and formed anti-insurgent militias in 2007 with US backing. However, a series of blasts in the desert province, the nation’s largest, in recent months has shattered the calm in the run up to the national vote, seen as a crucial test as Iraq emerges from decades of dictatorship, war and economic decline. Suicide bombers killed more than 25 people in Ramadi, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad, on Dec. 30 in attacks that targeted Anbar’s governor, Qassim Mohammed, seriously wounding him.

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