Suicide car bomb kills six in western Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide car bomb killed six people and wounded 16 others Wednesday in Iraq's western Anbar province, police said.

Two traffic police were among those killed in the attack near an Iraqi police checkpoint in Ramadi, a city 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad.

Police Lieutenant Hatim Abd said police were checking cars at the checkpoint in the central part of the city when a car at the end of the queue exploded.

"We have shut down all the roads in the area and evacuated the wounded and killed to the Ramadi hospital," he said.

Salah al-Obeidi, a doctor at the Ramadi hospital, said some of the wounded were in grave condition. He said the death toll might rise.

The vast desert region of Anbar is the scene of far less violence now than it was earlier in the war, when it the heart of a fierce Sunni Arab insurgency.

Security has improved significantly across Iraq, but a stubborn insurgency continues in ethnically mixed areas, especially parts of northern Iraq and in Baghdad.

The attack comes two weeks after U.S. combat troops withdrew from city and town centers across Iraq, a milestone in the plan to pull all U.S. soldiers out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

(Reporting by Fadhel al-Badrani; writing by Missy Ryan)