A car bomb exploded in a market in Iraq's Anbar province today, killing six people and wounding 21 others, a hospital official said.
The blast in Haditha, 190km west of Baghdad, came two days after a series of apparently co-ordinated bomb attacks near Shia mosques in Baghdad killed 31 people.
Anbar province had been relatively quiet since its tribal leaders in 2006 turned on al-Qaeda and other Sunni Islamist groups who had once dominated the region. However, the province has witnessed a spike in violence in recent weeks.
Violence has fallen sharply overall in Iraq in the last 18 months, and the number of civilians killed in July fell to 224 from 373 a month earlier, the Health Ministry said on Saturday.
But insurgents are still able to launch frequent large-scale attacks, raising questions about the Iraqi security forces' ability to cope alone after US troops withdrew from urban centres in June, part of a plan to leave Iraq by 2012.
Reuters