* Truck bomb near Iraqi school kills 13 *

[sinemm]

A suicide truck bomber targeted a police station in the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, killing at least 13 people and wounding dozens, including many children from a nearby school, police said.

Video by an Associated Press cameraman showed at least four wounded U.S. soldiers and one badly damaged American Humvee. The soldiers were being treated by Army medics, with one seated while having gauze bandages wound around his bloodied head.

Another soldier, whose nose was bleeding, was standing and waving directions to others. A third soldier was carried away on a stretcher and the fourth was being treated on the ground.

The attacker rammed the truck into the concrete blast barriers protecting the back of the compound at about 11:30 a.m., detonating his explosives, which were hidden under bags of flour, police spokesman Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said.

The Rahim Awa police compound is in a predominantly Kurdish neighborhood in a northern part of the city, and other officials said U.S. troops had been visiting an Iraqi criminal investigations unit there when the blast occurred. The U.S. command in Baghdad said it was looking into the report.

Bombings elsewhere in Iraq killed at least 11 people and wounded more than 40.

A British soldier also was killed in southern Iraq, British military spokeswoman Katie Brown said, the second British death in as many days. The death raised to 136 the number of British forces to die in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The violence came a day after Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) led a Republican congressional delegation on a heavily guarded tour of a central Baghdad market and declared that a nearly 7-week-old security crackdown to pacify the capital is working.

McCain, a presidential hopeful who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, acknowledged a difficult task lies ahead in Iraq, but criticized the media for not giving Americans enough information about the recent drop in execution-style sectarian killings, the establishment of security posts throughout the city and Sunni tribal efforts against al-Qaida in the western Anbar province.

"These and other indicators are reason for cautious, very cautious optimism about the effects of the new strategy," McCain said.

While Baghdad has seen a recent dip in violence as extra U.S. and Iraqi troops have flooded the streets, other parts of Iraq

[shady6]

this crap in iraq really needs to stop...