BAGHDAD, July 7 — A suicide truck bomber killed at least 105 people in a single blast north of Baghdad on Saturday, police officials said, leading to further fears that insurgents who fled intense military operations in Baghdad and Diyala are turning to targets away from the American troop buildup.
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A father comforted his 11-year-old daughter, who was wounded by a suicide bombing in Amerli, Iraq.
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The explosives-laden truck demolished dozens of fragile clay-built houses and shops in Amerli, a village of poor Shiite Turkmen about 70 miles north of Baquba, the largest city in Diyala. The Iraqi police said that in addition to the dead, at least 240 people were wounded. It was one of the deadliest single attacks of the war.

Zain al-Abadeen Abdul Hussein, a shop owner burned on his right arm and left leg, said the blast sent debris soaring into the air and set people on fire. “I saw children from my neighborhood burning,” he said.

The American military also reported Saturday the deaths of nine soldiers and marines on Thursday and Friday, eight killed during combat or from roadside bombs. The fatalities brought the military’s death toll to 23 for the first week of July, nearly five months since the beginning of the troop increase.

The attack in Amerli, and a similar blast hours earlier in a village not far away that killed 17 people and wounded six, showed the insurgents’ ability to single out defenseless civilians well outside Baghdad and the surrounding region, where five new American combat brigades arrived this year.

Witnesses in Amerli described a horrific scene of people running while on fire, and others shrieking for rescuers to pull them from beneath the scores of buildings turned into rubble by the blast.

Most of the dead were inside 40 homes and 20 shops destroyed in the attack, said Maj. Nawzad Abdullah of the Iraqi police. Some of the wounded were rushed to hospitals in Tuz Khurmato, about 15 miles away, but that city’s emergency services were overwhelmed, so other victims had to be sent much farther, to Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya.

Major Abdullah said about two-thirds of the dead were buried by their families without being taken to the morgue or hospital, because relatives were terrified that the roads were too dangerous and could be vulnerable to more bombings. By late Saturday afternoon, the Iraqi police estimated that 150 people had been released from the hospitals.

One survivor, Sukaina Abdullah, a 40-year-old housewife with burns on her legs and other wounds, said at a hospital in Kirkuk that she did not know whether her family was alive.

“I don’t know the fate of my husband and son,” Ms. Abdullah said. “Our house collapsed on us. The same thing happened to relatives and other people in our neighborhood. A lot of houses collapsed.”

Before thousands of American troops swept through Baquba last month, a senior American commander estimated that 300 to 500 insurgents were hunkered down in the part of the city that American forces were poised to invade; after the operation, the same officer said at least half had escaped or eluded capture.

The attack in Amerli came 12 hours after a suicide car bomber sped into a bustling market on Friday night in Zarkush, a Shiite-dominated farming district 40 miles northeast of Baquba, according to the local police.

No groups claimed immediate responsibility for the two blasts, but both were suicide attacks against scores of Shiite civilians, a hallmark of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other extremist Sunni groups.

The attacks followed several deadly days for American troops. Two soldiers were killed and two wounded south of Baghdad on Friday by an improvised bomb, the military said. Another died Friday in an undisclosed location from a “non-battle-related cause.”

Another improvised bomb on Friday killed two other soldiers and wounded three more on combat patrol in eastern Baghdad. In a separate attack, a particularly deadly type of roadside bomb that can pierce thick armor killed a soldier in southeastern Baghdad.

On Saturday, the military also reported the deaths of three servicemen in combat on Thursday: two marines in Anbar, and a soldier in western Baghdad.

Two British troops also died in the southern city of Basra, one on Friday in what British officials said was a noncombat accident, and another on Saturday, killed by an improvised bomb.

A suicide car bomber killed four Iraqi Army soldiers and wounded another at a checkpoint in the eastern part of the capital, an Interior Ministry official said. Fourteen unidentified bodies were also found throughout the city, the official said.

Iranian diplomats on Saturday were granted their first visit to five Iranians who had been detained by American forces in January in Erbil. The visit, at an American military detention facility, lasted for several hours, said Philip Reeker, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad.

Also on Saturday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for the organization led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to confront rogue and violent members and “make conclusive and clear decisions, so as not to be held responsible for those using its name in killings, terrorism and other unlawful actions.”

Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin, Stephen Farrell and Qais Mizher from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Kirkuk and Diyala.