At least 49 people were killed and others were wounded when a suicide bomber struck a funeral for a tribal leader in northern Iraq on Thursday. The bomber blew himself up in the Sunni village of Bu Mohammed, near the city of Baquba, north of the capital, Baghdad, officials said.

The strike appears to be the latest assault to intimidate members of the Sunnis Muslims who have joined forces with the US and Iraqi governments. It was the latest in a series of deadly attacks in Sunni areas in the last week.

It was also the deadliest since March 6. In the Baghdad bombing, a couple of months ago, 8 US soldiers were killed in a suicide attack.

The bomb attacks are blamed on the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Baghdad bombing was the deadliest single attack on U.S. troops in Iraq since January 28, when five soldiers were killed in a bomb and gun attack in Mosul. On September 10, eight US soldiers were killed in Baghdad.

Major General Kevin Bergner, a US military spokesman, said that setbacks were always to be expected, the Times Online notes.

“We have said all along that there will be variants in which we will see al-Qaeda and other groups seek to reassert themselves,” he said, according to the same source.

There has been a massive increase in reported cases of attacks between US-Iraqi forces and Shia militias, particularly members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Al-Mahdi Army and associated splinter groups.