A suicide bombing in eastern Iraq Tuesday killed at least 25 people at a police recruitment center.
Most of those killed in the attack were young Iraqis applying to join the police force in the town of Jalula in Diyala province. About 40 people were wounded.
In other violence, a car bomb exploded in the Iraqi town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, wounding about 12 people. A suicide bomber also blew up a vehicle near the northern city of Mosul, wounding eight Iraqi soldiers and a civilian.
Also Tuesday, U.S. defense spokesman Bryan Whitman said Washington strongly believes the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq should be based on conditions in that country.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Monday that U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have agreed that all foreign troops should leave Iraq by the end of 2011. The U.S. official says there is still no final deal on a timetable.
He says Mr. Maliki was referring to an "aspirational goal that is fairly far into the future."
In other developments, an Iraqi Kurdish brigade that was providing security in Diyala has withdrawn from its positions in recent days. Iraq's government ordered the Kurdish peshmerga troops to redeploy so that they could be replaced by regular army and police units.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military says coalition forces captured two suspected Iranian-backed insurgents in Baghdad Tuesday. It says one of those detained is accused of producing propaganda videos of attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces.
The military says coalition troops also captured eight suspected al-Qaida terrorists in central and northern Iraq on Monday and Tuesday.
The U.S. military also reports that Iraqi forces detained five people in connection with a bomb attack on U.S. troops in Baghdad on Monday. The blast did not cause any casualties.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.
