A suspected suicide car bomb has exploded outside a US military base in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi this afternoon.
A thick cloud of smoke rose from the site of the blast and there was an exchange of gunfire immediately afterwards, witnesses said. There was no immediate information on any casualties.
Eleven Iraqis and a US marine have been killed in election violence today as insurgents clashed with US troops and blew up a school designated as a polling centre.
Another US soldier died in an accident, a day after US troops sustained their heaviest losses since the Iraq invasion nearly two years ago.
The marine was killed and five others injured when insurgents fired mortars at their base near Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad.
Australian officials announced that one of two car bombings on Baghdad's airport road yesterday had injured eight of their soldiers riding in a convoy escorting Australian government officials.
In a continuation of the pre-election violence plaguing the country, three Iraqi civilians were killed in a house in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, when a car bomb exploded nearby.
Another three Iraqis were killed and seven injured when a roadside bomb missed a US convoy in Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad.
An Iraqi army soldier was killed and five civilians and two Iraqi policemen were wounded when a suicide car bomb exploded near a patrol in Baqouba. Near Tikrit, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi bystander and narrowly missed another passing US military convoy, police said.
In Samarra, armed men blew up a local school administration building after first ordering the staff to leave. The destroyed building had been scheduled to be a voting centre in Sunday's elections.
Sporadic clashes also erupted in Samarra between US troops and armed men, killing one Iraqi civilian and injuring another.
In Ramadi, capital of the insurgent-plagued province of Anbar west of Baghdad, another Iraqi National Guard soldier was killed when insurgents attacked a joint US-Iraqi force guarding a voting centre at a school.
The body of a colonel in the former Iraqi intelligence during Saddam's era, Talib Minshid, was found in Baqouba two days after he had been abducted by armed men.
A US soldier also died from a gunshot wound on a base near Tikrit in what the US military called an accident.
AP/Reuters