April 24, 2007	Tuesday	Rabi-us-Sani 06, 1428

BAGHDAD, April 23: A string of bomb attacks in Iraq on Monday killed at least 25 people and wounded dozens of others, as US and Iraqi officials defended the building of a wall around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad.

A car bomb near an office of Kurdish leader Massud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party killed 10 people and wounded 20 more in Tal Isquf, a mainly Christian village in northern Iraq, party spokesman Abdul Gani Ali said.

Witnesses said some of the victims were thought to be Kurdish “peshmerga” fighters.

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a restaurant near the capital's fortified Green Zone, killing seven people and wounding 14, a security official said.

The walled zone houses the US embassy and the Iraqi parliament, where a suicide bomber struck on April 12, killing one lawmaker.

Two more car bombs exploded in a parking lot near the Green Zone, opposite the Iranian embassy and close to the Iraqi defence ministry. A bystander was wounded in the first blast.The embassy was not damaged in either explosion and it was unclear if it was targeted. North of Baghdad in Baquba, a bomber exploded his car near the city council building, killing four policemen, police Lieutenant Ahmed Ali said.

In the western city of Ramadi, a car bomb destroyed a restaurant, killing four customers, said senior provincial security official Colonel Tareq al-Dulaimi.

It was not clear whether the restaurant was attacked by a suicide bomber, but an insurgent did kill himself in a similar assault on a nearby police checkpoint that wounded four officers and a bystander, he said.

“I cannot confirm the attack on the restaurant was a suicide attack, there are many body parts. There are 20 people wounded, some of them seriously,” said Dulaimi, who works with a coalition of tribes opposed to Al Qaeda.

A spokesman for the US Marines in Ramadi, Lieutenant Roger Hollenbeck, said that both attacks were launched by suicide car bombers.

Iraqi and US forces are battling an anti-US insurgency in Ramadi four years after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, but in recent months an alliance of Sunni tribes dubbed the Anbar Awakening has risen up to help them. An American soldier was killed by a bomb near his base at Muqdadiyah 100 kilometres north of Baghdad on Monday, taking to 61 the number of US fatalities this month, the US military said.

A British soldier was also killed in the southern city of Basra, the ministry of defence said in London, taking to 145 the number of British troops who have died in Iraq since 2003.

Iraqi and US officials, meanwhile, defended their decision to construct a five-kilometre wall around Baghdad's Sunni district of Adhamiyah, even though Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki opposed it.

The new US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, used his first news conference since his arrival last month to insist that the concrete wall was not intended to segregate the city's warring Sunni and Shiite communities.

“I think it's important... that one not lose sight of the threat that is motivating some of the decisions that have been made,” Crocker said.

“The intention in Adhamiyah is clearly not to segregate communities nor to engage in a form of political or social engineering,” he continued.

“It's to try to identify where the faultlines are, where avenues of attack lie and to set up the barriers literally to prevent those attacks.”The spokesman for the Iraqi forces engaged alongside US troops in enforcing the Baghdad security plan, Brigadier General Qassim Atta, said that many other districts already had or would have some form of barrier.

“In fact the Adhamiyah security barrier has been exaggerated by the media, and we anticipated there would be some reactions by weak-minded people,” he said.—AFP