2 suicide car bombs kill 20 near Iraq's Ramadi

Baghdad, May 7: Two suicide car bombers killed 20 people and wounded more than 40 in separate attacks near Iraq's city of Ramadi today, police said.

The first car bomb went off in a busy market in a town called Albu-Thiyab, east of Ramadi, said Tareq al-Thiyab, a police colonel and a government security adviser in western Anbar province.

The second car bomb targeted a police checkpoint in a town called al-Jazeera, he said.

A Sunni Arab tribal leader in the area confirmed there had been two suicide blasts but he had no information on casualties.

Sunni Islamist al Qaeda is engaged in a fierce power struggle with Sunni Arab tribesmen in Anbar province and its provincial capital Ramadi.

The tribal chiefs oppose al Qaeda's campaign of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the imposition of an austere form of Islam in the areas where the group holds sway.

Recent big suicide attacks in Anbar, an overwhelmingly Sunni province west of Baghdad, have been blamed on al Qaeda.

Tribal leaders formed an alliance last year and have sought to expel al Qaeda from Anbar.

While car bombings still plague Anbar, and especially Ramadi, violence has fallen across the province, US military officials have said.

At a news conference in Washington last month, the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, hailed the tribal leaders, saying they were ''helping transform Anbar province and other areas from being assessed as lost as little as six months ago to being relatively heartening''.

Ramadi lies 110 km west of Baghdad.

Reuters>