At least 19 people were killed in two suicide bombings in northern Iraq today as Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, urged his country's creditors to cancel about $60 billion in debts at an international conference in Sweden.

The twin bombings, which also left more than two dozen people injured, underlined the fragility of security gains made over the past few weeks following major, Iraqi-led operations in Iraq's three main cities of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul.

In the deadlier attack, 14 police recruits and two policemen were killed when a suicide bomber wearing a military uniform detonated an explosive vest near a police recruiting centre at a town called Sinjar, near the northern hub of Mosul. A further ten recruits and five policemen were wounded.

Dakheel Qassim, the mayor of Sinjar, said that town officials had received a tip-off about a potential attack and had warned the police to halt a recruitment drive that had been running for the past three days.

But local people desperate for jobs had queued up regardless.

“They gathered near the gate of the recruiting centre despite the fact that the police told them through loudspeakers that there was no recruiting today and to disperse," Mr Qassim said. “A suicide bomber came and blew himself up among them.”

The mountains around Sinjar are home to Iraq's non-Muslim Yazidi community. Two Yazidi villages last year suffered the deadliest attack since the 2003 invasion in which more than 400 people died in a multiple bombing.

Only hours before today's carnage, three people were killed and 12 wounded when a suicide bomber drove up to a group of policemen and detonated his explosives in al-Gabat, a village north of Mosul, police said.

In other violence, at least 12 insurgents were killed in clashes with members of a US-backed Iraqi neighbourhood patrol near the city of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, according to police.

The day's unrest occurred despite an offensive launched in Mosul this month by Mr Maliki. US commanders have described the city as the last urban stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq after many fighters were driven there from Baghdad and the surrounding belts by a surge of US forces last year.

The Prime Minister was keen to press his country's successes on the security front at the one-day conference in Stockholm attended by Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, along with about 100 delegations.

He recently headed an offensive to reclaim the southern Iraqi city of Basra from Shia militiamen, while Iraqi troops are also fanning out across the streets of Sadr City, a Shia slum in Baghdad, for the first time since the invasion.

Mr Maliki also used the conference to stress the need for countries to cancel Iraq's massive debts (some of which date back almost 30 years) along with compensation payments for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

“Iraq is not a poor country. It possesses tremendous human and material resources, but the debts of Iraq ... which we inherited from the dictator, hamper the reconstruction process," Mr Maliki told delegates.

“We are looking forward to the brother countries writing off its [Iraq's] debts, which are a burden on the Iraqi Government," he said, a reference to states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which are Iraq's biggest Arab creditors.

But the two countries sent only junior representatives to the conference, which marks the first annual review of the International Compact with Iraq agreed in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last year. That committed Baghdad to implement reforms in exchange for greater international support.

Violence in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level in more than four years, according to figures released by the US military. Officials always couch such glowing statistics with the warning that progress is fragile and reversible.

The drop in attacks is enabling the United States to withdraw five “surge” brigades of some 30,000 troops that were deployed last year without replacing them.

As part of this planned redeployment, about 4,000 soldiers from the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, will return home next month, the US military announced today. They have been working in the restive province of Diyala, north of Baghdad, since April last year.

Washington plans to have a 45-day evaluation period after withdrawing all the surge brigades by the end of July, before announcing further reductions.

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