Suicide bombers kill 22 in northern Iraq-police

MOSUL, Iraq, Nov 24 (Reuters) Two suicide bombers, one in a car and the other wearing an explosive vest, killed 22 people and wounded 26 in a market in a Shi'ite district in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar today, police said.

The blasts came a day after the deadliest attack in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion, when 202 people were killed in a series of explosions in a Shi'ite stronghold in Baghdad.

Officials at Tal Afar's main hospital said they had received 17 bodies, with 45 wounded. They said the death toll could rise.

Police in the regional capital Mosul said the bombs had exploded in a market, near an outdoor vehicle sales lot.

Tal Afar, close to the Syrian border, was for a time a stronghold of Sunni insurgent groups linked to al Qaeda. It has for the past year been held up as an example of successful counter-insurgency operations by the US military.

But the violence has seen Shi'ites and Sunnis flee previously mixed neighbourhoods, which are now largely segregated along sectarian lines.

Tal Afar is mostly home to Turkish-speaking ethnic Turkmen who are divided between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim believers. Some Sunnis in Tal Afar have complained that the arrival of Shi'ite- dominated Iraqi security forces under US supervision has led to their being oppressed and discriminated against.

Reuters DKA GC1556