At least 20 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a municipal office in overhwlemingly Sunni Arab Anbar province, killing the local mayor and at least 19 senior members of an anti-Qaeda front, according to Iraqi officials.

The attack which the US military said appeared to be carried out by Al-Qaeda occurred in the town of Garma, near the former Sunni rebel bastion of Fallujah, the Fallujah town council spokesman Kamal al-Ayash told AFP.

Ayash said the bomber detonated his explosive vest in the office of mayor Kamal al-Abdali as he was huddled in a meeting with members of an anti-Qaeda "Awakening" group around noon (0900 GMT).

"Abdali was one of those killed in the attack," Ayash said.

A defence ministry official confirmed that at least 20 people were killed and 20 more wounded in the attack.

US Sergeant Brooke Murphy said the attack also resulted in US casualties but gave no details, adding it "bears the hallmarks of having been carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Later Thursday, the military said three US marines and two interpreters were killed in the province but did not specify whether they were slain in the suicide attack.

The death of the marines took US losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 4,113, according to an AFP tally based on independent website www.icasualties.org.

The bombing marked the second attack on a municipal office in Iraq this week.

On Tuesday, the office of the advisory council of the Baghdad Shiite district of Sadr City was bombed in an attack which killed four Americans -- two soldiers and two civilian employees.

The violence in Garma came just days before Anbar province, once a hotbed of Sunni militancy, is due to be transferred by the US military to the control of Iraqi security forces.

The US military said the transfer would go ahead as planned despite the attack.

The country's largest province was the epicentre of the Sunni Arab insurgency which erupted after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. Fallujah became its symbol before the city was virtually razed to the ground in in a US offensive to recapture it in November 2004.

The violence in Anbar began to ebb in late 2006 when local Sunni tribes, weary of Al-Qaeda's extremism and brutal methods, switched allegiance and joined forces with the US military to chase them out.

The front became known as Sahwa or "Awakening". Most of its members are former insurgents who previously fought US forces.

In the second deadly bombing of the day, 18 people were killed and 80 wounded in the main northern city of Mosul, Iraqi and US officials said.

The US military said initial reports indicated that 17 Iraqi civilians and a policeman were killed, while 71 civilians and nine policemen were wounded in the car bombing.

An Iraqi police officer, who asked not to be named, said insurgents first fired several rockets into the Bab al-Tob market in the centre of Mosul at around 1:00 pm (1000 GMT).

Provincial governor Duraid Mohammed Kashmula then toured the market to assess the damage when a car bomb exploded nearby.

Kashmula survived the bombing, the officer added.

US commanders have said that Iraq's third largest city is the country's last urban bastion of Al-Qaeda. Iraqi troops backed by the US military launched a major offensive on May 14 to chase the jihadists out.

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