TUZ KHORMATO, Iraq — A suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives in the crowded outdoor market of a Shia farm town on Saturday, killing more than 100 people and leveling houses and stores, police officials said.

Separately, eight American troops and a British soldier were killed in fighting over two days.

The blast north of Baghdad, hours after a smaller suicide bombing in another Shia village killed more than 20, suggested Sunni militants are regrouping to launch attacks in regions further away from the capital where security is thinner.

Saturday’s blast ripped through a market in Armili around 8:30 am, destroying old mud-brick houses and setting cars on fire. Farmers’ pickup trucks drove victims 30 miles to the nearest health facility, in Tuz Khormato.

Police said one man fled the truck before it detonated with another man still inside.

Authorities and residents spent hours digging bodies out of the rubble of two dozen shops and houses, police said. Accounts of the final toll varied, hampered by the difficulty of the search and the farming town’s remote location.

Colonel Sherzad Abdullah, of the Tuz Khormato police, told The Associated Press that 115 were killed and some 200 wounded. An officer with the provincial security coordination center, which compiles casualty figures for the central government, said at least 100 died. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to release numbers.

Tuz Khormato’s police chief, Colonel Abbas Mohammed Amin, said 150 were killed and 245 wounded.

“Some are still under the rubble with no one to help them. There are no ambulances to evacuate the victims,” a resident who evacuated his wounded cousin in his car to Tuz Khormato hospital, Haitham Hadad, said. Dozens of weeping relatives of victims crowded the hospital, searching for loved ones.

At the market, “I saw destruction everywhere, dozens of cars destroyed, about 15 shops and many houses,” a man whose daughter and sister were wounded, Haitham Yalman, said.

The village 100 miles north of Baghdad is mainly made up of Shia Turkomen, an ethnic minority that is spread across north-central Iraq, though most of its members are Sunni Muslim.

The night before, a suicide bomber detonated a boobytrapped car at a funeral in the Shia Kurdish village of Zargosh, in the Sadiya region of Diyala province about 75 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said.

The blast killed 22 people and wounded 17, said the head of Diyala provincial council, Ibrahim Bajilan, and a police official in the provincial capital of Baqouba, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press. The village is home to about 30 Kurdish families who had been expelled under Saddam Hussein and returned after his fall.

Initial reports from officials had suggested two suicide bombings took place in the area — the one against the funeral and a second in another Kurdish Shia village called Ahmad Marif. Officials later said it was the same village, which goes by several names.

“There was a suicide attack against a funeral in the Sadiya area in Diyala,” an Interior Ministry spokesman, Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf, said. “We had no other suicide attacks in Diyala.”

Since mid-June, American forces have been waging an offensive in and around Baqouba, part of a stepped-up American crackdown seeking to bring calm to the capital. It aims to uproot Al Qaeda fighters and other Sunni insurgents who use the Baqouba region — and another part of Diyala province on Baghdad’s southestern edges — as a staging ground for attacks in the capital.

American commanders acknowledge many insurgent leaders fled Baqouba just ahead of the American assault there.

The new back-to-back bombings could mean the militants have moved a step away from the capital.

“Because of the recent American military operations, terrorists found a good hideout in Salahuddin province, especially in the outlying areas where there aren’t enough military forces,” an aide of the province’s governor, Ahmed al-Jubouri, said.

Violence continued in Baghdad, though at a lower level. A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-packed vehicle near an Iraqi army patrol in an eastern district of the capital, and there were reports of casualties, but the Interior Ministry could not immediately confirm the number.

The American military on Saturday announced the deaths of eight American servicemembers in combat, most in the Baghdad area.

Four soldiers were killed in two roadside bomb attacks on their patrols, both in the capital, the military said. An American soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were killed Friday when an explosively formed penetrator exploded near their patrol in southeastern Baghdad. Explosively formed penetrators are high-tech bombs that America believes are provided by Iran, a charge denied by Tehran.

On Thursday, two Marines were killed in western Anbar province and a soldier died in Baghdad, the latest military statement said.

Another soldier died Friday of non battle-related cause and his death is under investigation, the military said without giving further details.

In the far south of Iraq, British troops came under heavy attack by militants in Basra, killing one soldier and wounding three, the British military said Saturday.

Britain has withdrawn hundreds of troops from Iraq, leaving a force of around 5,500 based mainly on the fringes of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad. British bases come under frequent mortar attacks from Shia militias. America currently has about 155,000 troops in Iraq.