June 27, 2008	Friday	Jamadi-us-Sani 22, 1429

BAGHDAD, June 26: Bombers killed nearly 40 people in Iraq on Thursday, including 20 at a tribal council meeting in Anbar province just days before the US military transfers control of security for the vast western region to Iraqi forces.

The US military said there were American troop casualties in the attack in Anbar but gave no details.

In the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb killed 18 people and wounded 62 near the office of the governor of surrounding Nineveh province, officials said.

Nineveh Governor Duraid Kashmula had just left his office to investigate damage caused by two rockets that landed nearby when the car bomb went off. The governor was unhurt. Officials said the bomb may have been an assassination attempt.

Violence in Iraq fell to a four-year low last month, but there have been a spate of attacks in the past week, especially in and around Mosul, which the US military has called Sunni Islamist al Qaeda’s last major urban stronghold in Iraq.

The attacks suggest Al Qaeda, significantly weakened after a wave of US offensives in the past year, is not a spent force.

The American military said al Qaeda was likely behind the suicide bombing against US-backed Sunni Arab tribal leaders in the Anbar town of Garma, 30 km northwest of Baghdad.

A police spokesman in the nearby city of Falluja said 20 people had been killed and 12 wounded.

A tribal leader, Mizher Mshawih, and the head of the district council, Kamal Abdul-Salam, were among those killed, he said, as well as three policemen.

Garma is in Anbar province, once the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency against US forces and an al Qaeda haven.

In late 2006, Sunni Arab tribal leaders, sick of al Qaeda’s indiscriminate killing of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam, joined with the U.S. military to expel the group. Many al Qaeda fighters fled north, to provinces such as Nineveh.

Anbar handover: A US military source in Anbar who declined to be identified said there were no immediate plans to postpone the handover date in response to the bombing.

“We still have people planning for the event. Obviously our senior commanders are always assessing, but as of right now, there is no change,” he said.

The suicide bomber managed to get into a meeting between the tribal council of Garma, made up of local tribal leaders, and Abdul-Salam, the district council chief. The meeting was being held inside the building of the local council.

Defence Ministry spokesman Major-General Mohammed al-Askari blamed Al Qaeda for the surge of attacks in Mosul.

“These are sleeper cells that seize any opportunity ... There will be quick measures to end these attacks,” Askari said, without elaborating.

Iraqi security forces stepped up a crackdown against Al Qaeda last month in Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city.

Militants have intensified attacks on Iraqi councils this week.

On Tuesday, a bomb killed 10 people, including two US government employees and two US soldiers, at a council meeting in the Baghdad stronghold of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.—Reuters