A suicide bomber Thursday blew himself in a municipal office in western Iraq, killing the local mayor and 10 senior members of an anti-Qaeda front, an official told AFP.
  
The attack, in which six people were also wounded, took place in the town of Gurma, near the former Sunni rebel bastion of Fallujah in western Anbar province around noon (0900 GMT), Fallujah town council spokesman Kamal al-Ayash told AFP.
  
He said the bomber detonated his explosives in the office of the local mayor, Kamal al-Abdali, as he was huddled in a meeting with members of an anti-Qaeda "Awakening" front.
  
"At least 10 senior members of the Awakening group have been killed," Ayash said, adding that the mayor was also killed. "Six people were wounded."
  
The attack comes just days before Anbar province, once a hotbed of Sunni militancy, is due to be transferred by the US military to the control of Iraqi security forces.
  
On Monday, US military spokesman in Baghdad Lieutenant David Russell told AFP the security of the province was to be transferred to the Iraqis in 10 days.
  
Anbar would be the tenth of Iraq's 18 provinces to be handed back to Iraqi forces by the US-led coalition amid a push to transfer security control of the entire country back to Baghdad.
  
Anbar province, the country's largest, was the epicentre of a brutal Sunni Arab-led fight against the US military after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.
  
In the early years of the insurgency, US forces fought raging battles in the province, especially in the capital Ramadi and the nearby city of Fallujah.
  
Fallujah became the symbol of the ultra-violent insurgency before it was virtually razed to the ground in November 2004 by a US military assault launched to seize control of the city.
  
The US military has lost 1,295 service members in the province since the invasion, second only to Baghdad where it lost 1,308 troops, according to the independent website www.icasualties.org.
  
The website says November 2004 remains the deadliest month for the military in Iraq. It lost 137 troops that month when it launched the Fallujah assault.
  
The violence in the province started ebbing in late 2006 when local Sunni tribes, weary of al Qaeda's extremism and brutal methods, switched allegiance and formed local groups to fight them.
  
Since then Anbar has been hailed as a symbol of stability.