MOSUL - A suicide bomber sped into a Shiite village in northern Iraq on Monday and blew up a truck packed with explosives, unleashing a massive blast that killed 30 people and pulverised homes.
It was the deadliest attack on yet another bloody day in Iraq, where the military announced the deaths of five more US soldiers, and the overlapping insurgency and sectarian conflict sent another 15 Iraqis to their coffins.
The bomber detonated his deadly charge after driving across farmland to Al-Quba, killing 30 people, including 12 children, and flattening mud-brick houses, the mayor of nearby Tal Afar, Major General Najim Abdallah, told AFP.
"It was filled with a huge amount of explosives. Twenty houses were destroyed, 10 of them entirely wiped out," said Abdallah, speaking from the nearest town, 20 kilometres (12 miles) away, to scramble emergency services.
Five women were among the dead and 14 people were in a critical condition in hospitals after the attack, he said. Provincial police spokesman Brigadier General Abdulkarim Khalaf al-Juburi said 50 people were wounded.
Witnesses spoke of seeing foam to make mattresses sticking out of the truck to disguise the explosives hidden underneath, Abdallah said.
Bodies were pulled from the rubble of flattened homes in the village whose nearly 200 houses are built mostly from mud, and the victims were ferried to hospitals as far away as the neighbouring Kurdish province of Dohuk, he said.
"I was sitting at home when I saw a big truck speeding along. I went outside to watch and suddenly it exploded, its contents flung everywhere," 50-year-old Abu Qassim told AFP from his hospital bed in the northern city of Mosul.
"My house was destroyed. My wife and four of my children were injured as well as me," he said.
Bombings are increasingly common in villages, as militants flee to rural backwaters away from thousands of US and Iraqi security forces cracking down on Baghdad and other flashpoint cities under a five-month-old security plan.
Taxi driver Abu Hamid said he was chatting to his cousin in Al-Quba when he spotted the vehicle at a distance.
"I was amazed to see a truck moving across farmland because it would destroy the plants. The truck hit a building before blowing up. The explosion was a disaster," he said, also speaking from a Mosul hospital.
Violence further south killed another 18 people, including nine wiped out when a roadside bomb ripped through an unofficial stop for one of the battered minibuses used by thousands of people in Baghdad.
The device blew up after a minibus stopped to collect passengers in the Diyala Bridge neighbourhood in the southern suburbs, security officials said.
Shrapnel sprayed the area as Iraqis got on and off the minibus, and others stood waiting for a different line.
The Al-Zafaraniyah hospital said nine people were killed, including a woman, and eight wounded were admitted with mainly burns injuries.
Another three people were killed when a booby-trap exploded in a Baghdad minibus in eastern part of the capital, two security officials said.
Four US soldiers were killed and 12 soldiers wounded in the flashpoint city of Baquba on Monday, bringing US losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,670, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
Thousands of US and Iraqi forces have been operating against Al-Qaeda linked militants since June, but senior commanders have said that most of the senior Al-Qaeda leaders in the area fled before the assault began.
Another US soldier was killed in Baghdad on Sunday, the military announced.
In the Sunni Arab heartland also north of the capital, mortar rounds crashed through private homes, killing six civilians and wounding another 17 in the town of Dhuluiyah, the local police chief and hospital director said.
Police Colonel Mohammed Khaled said one woman was among the dead, with four women and five children wounded, and five homes seriously damaged.
Pressing its security campaign, the US military said two air strikes killed eight presumed fighters in raids against Iraqi affiliates of Al-Qaeda, with another three killed by ground troops in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad.

08/06/2007 15:12 GMT