A suicide car bomb has blown up near a National Guard centre in western Iraq, killing at least 16 people, as US and Iraqi forces struggled to quell insurgents bent on derailing elections due in January.
An Interior Ministry official said the bomb targeted recruits for the paramilitary force in the town of Anah, 260 km northwest of Baghdad, near the Syrian border. He said 20 people had been wounded and the death toll could rise.
Witnesses said they saw the car hurtling towards the National Guard centre just before it exploded.
Elsewhere, US and Iraqi forces were pursuing a security sweep in a deadly triangle southwest of Baghdad as part of a strategy to prevent insurgents from torpedoing the elections.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a news conference in Baghdad he was impressed by the interim government's election preparations and confident the polls would go ahead.
Parts of Iraq have serious security problems, he said. "But there is another story going on of the new Iraq seeking to break out of the oppression and tyranny of Saddam (Hussein) and also from the oppression and tyranny of the terrorists."
There was no sign of the violence easing and no breakthrough in talks between a radical Shi'ite militia and the government to end nightly clashes in a sprawling Baghdad slum district.
Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji, chief spokesman for rebel Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said negotiations were still going on to stop the Sadr City fighting. "There's no deal yet," he told Reuters.
A source close to Sadr said the cleric was demanding that US forces stop shelling Sadr City, stop arresting Sadr's followers, release all senior Sadr aides being held, and rebuild the district, home to some two million people.
The cleric has also demanded reparations be paid for damage done to the area by sustained US attacks in recent weeks.
The source said talks this morning had ended inconclusively but would resume later in the day.
Sadr, a firebrand cleric who is about 30 years old, has led two uprisings against US forces in the past six months. His Mehdi Army militiamen are entrenched in Sadr City, in northeast Baghdad, from where they attack US patrols and convoys.
In recent days, US warplanes and gunships have repeatedly attacked neighbourhoods in Sadr City.
In other violence, a roadside bomb killed a civilian and wounded four policemen in the southern city of Basra. A Kurdish tribal leader and a companion were shot dead in the northern city of Mosul. And the US military mounted more overnight air strikes on suspected militant hideouts in the rebel-held western town of Falluja. Residents said a child was wounded.
The US military and Iraq's US-backed interim government have pledged to retake all insurgent-held areas by the end of the year to ensure that elections can proceed on time.