At least 18 people have been killed by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq.
An oil tanker was rammed into the police headquarters and other government buildings in a town near Kirkuk.
It exploded causing part of the building to collapse and demolishing nearby houses.
Police said the blast took place in Sulaiman Bek, 90km south of Kirkuk.
They said the dead included women and children and that at least 35 people had been wounded.
The latest attack, two days after a Baghdad bomb killed 87 people, was carried out as the US military pressed an air and ground assault on Al-Qaeda strongholds north of Baghdad.
The military said on Thursday it had killed 41 people it described as insurgents and had destroyed some of their hideouts.
Meanwhile, a barrage of mortar bombs hit Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone and several plumes of smoke could be seen rising near buildings housing the Iraqi parliament and government offices.
On the other side of the river Tigris, a thick plume of black smoke could be seen near the area where a suicide truck bomb partly demolished a Shia mosque and killed 87 people on Tuesday. The source of the smoke was not immediately known.
