RAMADI, Iraq (AFP) – Suicide attacks targeting a police checkpoint and a Shia Muslim procession in western and central Iraq on Sunday killed up to 13 people, including six policemen and a journalist.

The violence comes two weeks ahead of a deadline for Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki to form a cabinet in a bid to end months of government impasse, and days before the climax of the Shia commemoration ceremony of Ashura on Friday.
In the western city of Ramadi, a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives near Anbar provincial government offices, killing 11 people, including six policemen, a doctor said.
The blast occurred at around 10:00 am (0700 GMT) at a police checkpoint in the centre of the city, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad, and left 41 people wounded, according to police Major Rahim Zabin and a doctor at Ramadi hospital.
“A suicide car bomb targeted a police checkpoint in the centre of the city, about 200 meters (yards) from the Anbar government offices,” Zabin said.
A doctor at Ramadi hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity, put the toll at 11 dead and 41 wounded.
Among the dead were six police and a cameraman for local satellite television channel al-Anbar TV, 24-year-old Omar Rassim al-Qaisi. A woman was also killed in the blast, while women and children were among the wounded.
Zabin, however, put the death toll at eight, including the six police.
Ramadi is the capital of predominantly Sunni Arab Anbar province, Iraq's biggest by area.
Both the city and the province were a key Sunni insurgent base in the years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but since 2006 local tribes have sided with the US military and day-to-day violence has dropped dramatically.
Major attacks do still take place, however.
On February 18, a suicide bomber killed 10 people, including four policemen and a young girl, and wounded 15 in an attack on a checkpoint near the city's provincial government offices.
Meanwhile, in the ethnically-mixed city of Baquba, capital of Diyala province to Baghdad's north, two people were killed and three others wounded when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vest near a Shia Muslim procession, according to police Major Furat al-Dulaimi.
Every day, thousands of pilgrims, many of them from Iran and other countries with large Shia populations, visit Karbala and Iraq's other major Shia shrines in Samarra, Najaf and Baghdad.
That number rises dramatically for Ashura as millions of pilgrims travel -- many on foot -- to Karbala, the home of shrines to Imam Hussein and his half-brother Imam Abbas.
According to the calculations of Iraq's top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Ashura is to climax this year on December 17.
Though attacks remain common, violence has dropped dramatically since its peak in 2006 and 2007 -- the number of people killed in violence across Iraq last month was the lowest in a year for the second month running.
Photo: Iraqi security forces stand guard while a street sweeper cleans up after a car bomb attack in Ramadi, 70 miles (115 kilometers) west of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Dec. 12, 2010. (AP photo)
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