A suicide bomber killed at least 21 people and wounded more than 40 at an Iraqi army recruiting centre in western Baghdad today, officials said.
The attack came as a leaked British government memo revealed US and British hopes to more than halve their troop numbers in Iraq over the next year. Any such plan would rely on recruiting and training Iraqi forces to take over. But army recruits are a prime target for insurgents.
One Interior Ministry source put the death toll at Baghdad's Muthanna airfield recruitment station at 22. Police said 42 were wounded. The Defence Ministry said 21 died. The attack, claimed by al Qaeda's Iraq wing in an Internet posting, was the bloodiest in Iraq for a week, since an almost identical attack on police recruits at another Baghdad base.
A suicide car bomber also killed three civilians and wounded 10 near the local authority building in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said. Four police officers were killed and three wounded further north near Mosul when a suicide bomber hit the motorcade of a district police chief.
The Muthanna airfield recruitment station, near Baghdad's city centre, has been struck before, part of a sustained campaign by Sunni Arab insurgents against the Shia-led government's fledgling security forces. Those troops and police are a vital element in Washington's publicly proclaimed strategy of withdrawing its 140,000 or so troops over time and putting Iraqis in the front line of fighting the revolt among the once-dominant Sunni minority.
The leaked British government memo, published in the Mail on Sunday, described plans by Washington and London to cut their forces in Iraq by more than half by mid-2006, turning over territory to Iraqi forces to control. The British government said the memo reflected just one possible scenario. A spokesman for the Pentagon, which has said the war could last years, said it had not decided upon a schedule for withdrawal.
Meanwhile US forces said they had released an Iranian-born American filmmaker today, whose detention as a suspected insurgent for more than a month had prompted complaints from his family in Los Angeles and from US civil liberties campaigners.
A military spokesman said the investigation and release of 44-year-old Cyrus Kar showed the detention system in Iraq worked.
Iraqi troops found 35 washing machine timers - a common component in bombs - in a taxi Kar was being driven in.