A roadside bomb followed by a suicide bomber detonating an explosives-rigged truck at a police checkpoint in northern Iraq killed 21 people Monday, while four people died in other attacks.

A roadside bomb followed by a suicide bomber detonating an explosives-rigged truck at a police checkpoint in northern Iraq killed 21 people Monday, while four people died in other attacks.

Militants have launched major operations in five different provinces in the past few days, killing scores of people.  

Local official Shallal Abdul Baban said the blasts at the police checkpoint in Tuz Khurmatu killed 21 people, among them four police, updating an earlier toll.
The bombings also wounded 140 people and caused "great destruction", he said.

The checkpoint that was targeted was near an office of President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party.

Another suicide car bombing struck an army checkpoint south of the city of Baquba on Monday, killing two soldiers and wounding five, while two more people died in attacks in Baghdad, officials said.

The violence came a day after a car bomb followed by a suicide bombing near a PUK office and a Kurdish intelligence building in Jalawla, another northern town, killed 18 people.

Takfiri group, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed the Jalawla attack in a statement posted on Twitter, and said it was carried out by two suicide bombers, one Egyptian and an Iraqi Kurd.

And violence elsewhere in Iraq killed 13 more people on Sunday.