Lorry bomb kills 12

By Mustafa Mohammed

KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed 12 people and wounded around 150 in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Monday in the latest attack by insurgents using explosives-laden trucks.

Insurgents have hit a string of northern towns in the past 10 days in bombings that have killed hundreds of people.

Many of the victims of Monday's attack were women and children at a nearby school, police said.

The U.S. military, thinly stretched by the war and facing proposed funding cuts by the Democratic-controlled Congress, said on Monday that thousands of troops would have to return to Iraq sooner than their promised year at home to maintain President George W. Bush's new Baghdad security plan.

Officials, who blame the recent attacks on Sunni Islamist militants from al Qaeda, say insurgents have shifted the focus of attacks to outside Baghdad due to the nearly seven-week-old crackdown in the capital.

In other violence, the bodies of 19 men from a Shi'ite village kidnapped by gunmen at a fake checkpoint north of Baghdad were found on Monday, police said. All had been shot in the head in one of the biggest kidnappings in months.

The joint offensive by U.S. and Iraqi forces is seen as a final attempt to halt Iraq's plunge into sectarian civil war.

The Pentagon said its decision to deploy 9,000 troops would allow commanders to maintain the crackdown, but about half of them will have to return to combat before their year at home is up. The units will largely replace U.S. forces already in Iraq, which number around 145,000.