Two suicide car bombs kill 20 near Iraq's Ramadi

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two suicide car bombers killed 20 people and wounded more than 40 near Iraq's city of Ramadi on Monday in separate attacks that police blamed on al Qaeda.

Sunni Islamist al Qaeda is engaged in a fierce power struggle with traditionally minded Sunni Arab tribesmen in western Anbar province and its provincial capital Ramadi.

The first car bomb went off in a packed market Albu-Thiyab, a town northeast of Ramadi, said Tareq al-Thiyabi, a police colonel and government security adviser in Anbar province.

He said 12 people were killed at the market, including women and children. More than 25 people were wounded.

The second car bomb exploded soon after at a police checkpoint in a town called al-Jazeera, where eight people including two policemen were killed, he added.

The town is home to many of the Sunni Arab tribal leaders who formed an alliance against al Qaeda last year.

"They are terrorists. They are from al Qaeda," Thiyabi said, when asked who he thought was behind the twin blasts.

A Sunni Arab tribal leader in the area confirmed there had been two suicide blasts but he had no information on casualties.

The tribal chiefs oppose al Qaeda's campaign of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the imposition of an austere form of Islam in the areas where the group holds sway.

Recent big suicide attacks in Anbar, an overwhelmingly Sunni province west of Baghdad, have been blamed on al Qaeda.

Tribal leaders have sought to expel al Qaeda from Anbar, and have had some success, pushing some of the al Qaeda militants out, U.S. military officials have said.

While car bombings still plague Anbar, and especially Ramadi, violence has fallen across the province, they say.

At a news conference in Washington last month, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, hailed the tribal leaders, saying they were "helping transform Anbar province and other areas from being assessed as lost as little as six months ago to being relatively heartening".

Ramadi lies 110 km (68 miles) west of Baghdad.

(Additional reporting by Mussab Al-Khairalla and Ibon Villelabeitia)