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BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber killed 23 Iraqi recruits hours after they joined the army when he rammed a truck into their vehicle near Baghdad on Sunday, in one of wave of attacks that killed 250 people over the weekend.
The bloodiest attack came on Saturday local time, when a truck packed with explosives covered with hay blew up in a crowded market in the northern town of Tuz Khurmato, killing 150 people and wounding 250.
In the wake of the weekend carnage, Sunni Vice President Tarek al-Hashemi said Iraqis had the right to take up arms to protect themselves.
"The citizen has the right to be protected by the government and the security apparatus ... but when there are failures there is no alternative or there is no escape but for people to defend themselves," Hashemi said in a statement.
He said the state should supply "money, weapons and experience" for such security measures but keep control of them.
The surge in bombings comes despite a major US-backed offensive that has focused largely on Baghdad and provinces around the capital.
The offensive has driven many militants out of Baghdad to areas where the troop presence is lighter.
US officials blame most big bombings on al Qaeda in Iraq, which they say is trying to trigger full-scale civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.
Police and army officials said the bomber who targeted the recruits drove into a truck carrying the young Sunni Arab men to Baghdad just after they had joined the army in western Anbar province. They said 27 recruits were wounded in the attack near the town of Haswa.
Sunni Arab tribal leaders in Anbar have rounded up thousands of men to join local security forces to fight Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, in anger at the militant group's indiscriminate killings of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam.
Two car bombs killed eight people in Baghdad, police added.
Police said they also found 29 bodies in Baghdad on Sunday. Most had been shot, victims of sectarian death squads. Figures compiled by Reuters showed nearly 250 people were killed in violence over the weekend.
In the northern Shi'ite town of Tuz Khurmato, 185 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police and residents used heavy machinery and shovels to search for bodies under the rubble of nearly 100 shops and homes after Saturday's truck bomb blast.
Across the town, relatives mourned and buried their dead.
"I can't comprehend what has happened. My entire family was killed in one moment," said Abbas Kadhim, who told Reuters the blast levelled his house, killing his wife, his two sons aged 6 and 8, his parents and a brother.
"There is no value left in my life ... I have asked God why I didn't just die with them so I wouldn't have to go through this torture."
Two police officers in Tuz Khurmato confirmed 150 people had been killed. The officers said 20 people were still missing and 250 were wounded.
The death toll made it the second deadliest insurgent bombing in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003. In March, a truck bomb killed 152 people in the northern town of Tal Afar.
"I just visited the scene. It looks like an earthquake happened there," Shalal Abid al-Ahmed, a member of the Salahuddin provincial council, told Reuters.
One policeman said: "People from the whole town of Tuz Khurmato are helping, some have brought along small shovels."
- REUTERS
