Baghdad, Oct 11 (DPA) Three bombings targeting a meeting on national reconciliation Sunday killed at least 22 people and injured 45 more in the Iraqi city of al-Ramadi, police and witnesses said.
The bombings targeted officials gathered in the headquarters of the al-Anbar’s provincial government in western Iraq for a conference on national reconciliation. No participants in the meeting were harmed, police told DPA.

The first two bombs were planted on a car and a motorcycle in a parking lot in front of the government compound in the city of al-Ramadi, 118 km west of Baghdad.

Soon after, a man detonated explosives packed into his car at a nearby security checkpoint as emergency workers and volunteers carried the wounded to a nearby hospital, police and witnesses told DPA.

Many of the casualties were police officers, though police said that in the initial confusion after the attack, it was difficult to know how many.

It was the latest in a series of deadly bomb attacks in the area in recent months.

Al-Ramadi and nearby Falluja, in Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland, were formerly the site of some of the worst fighting between Sunni insurgents and Iraqi and US forces in the area.

The worst of the fighting subsided after 2006, when Iraqi and US forces enticed some former insurgents to join government-allied Sahwa, or “Awakening”, militias with promises of weapons, money, training and jobs in the interior ministry.