Scores of Iraqi people died and dozens more wounded in a series of suicide bombings in Shiite villages north of Baghdad.

In one of the worst attacks, a suicide bomber detonated a large truck in the town of Armili's outdoor market on Saturday morning. The blast in the town, located about 160 kilometres north of Baghdad, levelled houses and stores and buried victims in the rubble.

An estimated 115 people died, although another estimate put the toll at 150. More than 200 others were wounded.

Villagers said additional victims were still trapped under the rubble of destroyed homes and businesses, and the death toll could continue to rise because many of the injured were considered to be in critical condition.

"Some are still under the rubble with no one to help them. There are no ambulances to evacuate the victims," Haitham Hadad, a resident who evacuated his wounded cousin in his car to Tuz Khormato hospital, told AP.

The hospital was packed with relatives of the victims, many of them weeping as they searched for their family members.

Victims had to be transported 48 kilometres to the nearest hospital in Tuz Khormato.

In an earlier attack in another Shiite village, a suicide bomber killed more than 20 people.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, told The Associated Press he expected Sunni extremists to attempt "a variety of sensational attacks and grab the headlines to create a 'mini-Tet.'"

In 1968, the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong guerrillas launched massive number of attacks on Tet, the Vietnamese new year. While the attacks failed militarily, the event helped kill U.S. public support for the war effort.

While U.S. forces have been focusing their efforts on Baghdad's volatile northern flank in the past three weeks, attempting to slow fighting in the capital, Sunni militants seem to have shifted their campaign to more rural locations.

On Friday night, a suicide bomber set off a booby-trapped car at 9:30 p.m. outside a cafe in the Shiite Kurdish village of Ahmad Marif roughly 136 kilometres northeast of Baghdad. Twenty-six people were killed and 33 were wounded, a Diyala province security official told AP.

About 30 minutes later, a suicide bomber set off an explosives belt in Zargosh, another Shiite Kurdish village. Twenty-two people were killed and 17 were wounded, according to reports.

On Saturday, the U.S. announced eight U.S. military personnel had been killed. One British soldier was also reported killed.

In total, 3,599 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

One interesting development on Saturday was a meeting of dozens of Sunni Muslim clerics and tribal leaders.

They pledged to fight terrorism and restore peace in Anbar province, for years the heartland of the Sunni insurgency against the United States's forces in Iraq.

Many of the leaders are members of the Anbar Awakening, formed in April to co-operate with U.S. forces against al Qaeda.

The meeting called for the release of security detainees who have not been convicted of crimes and for a bigger role for their group in representing Sunni interests.

With files from The Associated Press