Three suicide car bombings killed 20 people in northern Iraq on Thursday, including a top municipal council leader and a bodyguard of Iraq's Kurdish deputy prime minister, officials said. Continuing violence during the past days has also claimed the lives of three children, a U.S. soldier and a Sunni Muslim cleric, underscoring the rampant, random nature of an insurgency that has killed almost 800 people since the April 28 announcement of Iraq's new government, according to an Associated Press count. At least 12 people were killed in a massive explosion targeting a restaurant in Tuz Khormato, 55 miles south of the northern city of Kirkuk, the Iraqi Defense Ministry said in a statement. Police Lt. Sabah Hidayat said at least 40 people were wounded. The suicide bombing tore apart the town's Baghdad Restaurant, where bodyguards of Iraq's Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rowsch Nouri Shaways, were eating, said police Brig. Sarhad Qadre. In the northern city of Kirkuk, a suicide car bomber killed four Iraqi bystanders and wounded at least 11 others, said Dr. Bassam Mohammed of Kirkuk Emergency Hospital. The explosion targeted a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers carrying civilian contractors, damaging one of the vehicles but injuring none of its occupants, the U.S. military said. Further south in Baqouba, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, another suicide bomber killed four people, including Hussein Alwan al-Tamimi, 41, deputy head of Iraq's northeastern Diyala provincial council since January, police Col. Mudhafar Mohammed said. Three of his bodyguards also died in the attack on his convoy; four people were wounded. A U.S. soldier assigned to the Marines was killed when a roadside bomb struck the vehicle he was traveling in Wednesday near the volatile western Iraqi city of Ramadi, the military announced Thursday. Another American soldier, attached to Task Force Liberty, died of non-battle-related wounds Wednesday in the northern city of Kirkuk, the military said. The incident is under investigation. As of Thursday, at least 1,665 U.S. military members have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
