Suicide bomber kills four as 11 die in Iraq unrest

The bomber walked up to a checkpoint in the Shifa neighbourhood in the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab area west of Mosul and blew himself up,killing four officers and wounding four,police said.

Medics confirmed the casualty toll,adding that two of the wounded were in a critical condition.

Last night,gunmen killed three policemen at another checkpoint in the west of the city,police said.

The gunmen struck at around 1900 GMT in a neighbourhood inhabited by economists,most of them government employees.

The regime of now executed dictator Saddam Hussein provided dedicated housing estates for key professional groups.

West of Mosul,in the town of Tal Afar,security forces thwarted an attempted suicide bombing today morning,police said.

The would-be bomber tried to blow up his car in a livestock market in the town,which has a large Shiite Turkmen community.

But officers spotted him,and shot and killed him before he could detonate his payload.

Nineveh province,which has its headquarters in Mosul,has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity even as levels of political violence have fallen off in much of the rest of the country.

Nineveh is split between Sunni Arab and Kurdish communities who are bitterly divided over the ambitions of Kurdish leaders to incorporate large chunks of the province into their autonomous region in the north. It also has Assyrian,Shabak,Turkmen and Yazidi minorities.

Al-Qaeda has exploited the ethnic and confessional differences to make the province one its enduring strongholds in Iraq.

In Diyala province,another ethnically mixed jihadist stronghold further south,militants killed two anti-Qaeda militiamen,security officials said.