A suicide bomber in northern Iraq killed himself and an Iraqi child and wounded more than 50 people, including six US personnel, according to local people and the US military yesterday.
The US military also announced the deaths of two American soldiers, killed by makeshift bombs in Baghdad.
In the fifth vehicle bomb attack in Iraq in as many weeks, a four-wheel drive stopped suddenly in front of a house in the Kurdish city of Arbil on Tuesday evening and exploded with the driver inside, residents said.
They said the house was used by US intelligence agents. A military spokeswoman initially said it had been a "safe house". Later, military press officers became tight-lipped, confirming little more than that the blast had taken place.
Fierce flames leapt into the night sky in the aftermath of the blast. A woman hurried away cradling a baby and an armed man carried a bloodied man over his shoulder from the scene.
Local people said the bomber had died. A Kurdish official told Reuters a five-year-old child had also died from injuries inflicted by the blast.
Forty-seven Iraqis were wounded, the US military spokeswoman said in Baghdad. She said six Department of Defence personnel had also been injured but had no details on whether they were civilians or soldiers.
The bombing 350 kilometres north of Baghdad was the latest setback to US-led efforts to pacify Iraq following the war that ousted Saddam Hussein on April 9.
Almost 70 US soldiers have been killed by hostile fire since the official end of major combat in Iraq on May 1. A soldier attached to the US Army's 1st Armored Division was killed in Baghdad yesterday when a bomb exploded during an operation to defuse it, US Central Command said.
The previous day, another soldier was killed when his vehicle ran over a home-made landmine northeast of the city, bringing to an end a period of more than a week during which no US troops had died as a result of hostile acts.
Even more alarming for Washington has been the spate of car bombings against foreign organisations and against Iraqis working with the occupying powers in recent weeks. US officials have mostly blamed diehard Saddam supporters for postwar attacks but are also increasingly pointing the finger of suspicion at foreign Islamic militants. Some are talking of a possible alliance between the two groups.
Officials have singled out Ansar al-Islam, a group with links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network which had a base in an enclave of Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq before the war, as a suspect in several recent bombings.
Vehicle bombers have hit the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, United Nations offices and the capital's police headquarters. A a top Shi'ite cleric was among more than 80 people killed by a car bomb in the city of Najaf last month.
A Polish-led force responsible for south-central Iraq said it planned to take over Najaf on September 21 from US marines, who postponed the handover after the bombing there in an effort to keep a lid on tensions in the city.
A US general said the handover could take place even sooner - "I would hope by the end of the week," Lieutenant General James Conway, who handed the rest of the Marines zone to a Polish commander last week, told a Pentagon briefing.