"It was a roadside bomb that went off near a pick-up carrying construction workers in Zobaa village west of Abu Ghraib," said a police source who asked not to be named. A medical source at the nearby hospital in Falluja said they had received six dead bodies and eight wounded.

Abu Ghraib was once one of the most volatile areas in Iraq and was used by Al-Qaeda fighters as a safe haven during the peak of sectarian fighting in Iraq in 2006-2007.

Nearly nine years after the US led-invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, violence has declined sharply in Iraq, but bombings and other attacks still occur daily as the last American troops prepare to leave at the end of the year.