In 2004 then-president Gloria Arroyo withdrew a contingent of Filipino police and soldiers assigned to the US-led coalition in Iraq after a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped and threatened with beheading.

The driver was released unharmed and Arroyo banned all Filipinos from working in the country.

Now Filipino overseas workers, a major engine of the economy, will be allowed to return to Kurdistan but not the rest of Iraq, Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez said in a statement.

"POEA (the official Philippine Overseas Employment Administration) has already lifted the deployment ban for the Kurdistan region in Iraq," he said. "Only the Kurdistan region for now."

Despite the ban, officials estimated that as many as 10,000 Filipinos continued to work in Iraq.

Nine million Filipinos, 10 percent of the population, work overseas largely in low-skilled jobs such as maids and sailors, but also as nurses, engineers and IT specialists.

They sent $18.17 billion back to the Philippines last year, equivalent to 10 percent of the country's GDP, and are hailed as modern-day heroes by many of their countrymen for helping keep the economy afloat.

Two people, including an Iraqi army first lieutenant, were killed when a suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in Fallujah, west of Baghdad in Sunni Anbar province, a police captain who spoke on condition of anonymity said.

He said six others, including four soldiers, were also wounded in the attack. Omar Dalli from Fallujah general hospital confirmed receiving two bodies and treating six people.

In Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, a parked car bomb that detonated as a police patrol was passing wounded at least six people, including four policemen, a police major and a medic said.

Two people were also killed when a magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to their car detonated in Iskandiriyah, south of Baghdad, police said. A medical official in Mussayib general hospital, the nearest medical facility, confirmed the toll.

In another attack, a bomb blast outside a soldier's house in the town of Himreen, in Diyala province, killed the soldier's mother and left his sister wounded.

The casualties were confirmed by doctor Ahmed Ibrahim from the main hospital in Diyala's provincial capital of Baquba.

In western Baghdad's Mansur neighbourhood, a suicide bomber wounded four people, an official in the interior ministry said.

He added that policemen shot the suicide bomber before he reached a checkpoint, but the bomber managed to blow himself up.

Also in Baghdad's district of Karrada, five people were wounded in two successive attacks by a sticky bomb and a roadside bomb, the interior ministry official said.

Violence across Iraq is down from its peaks in 2006 and 2007, but attacks remain common. A total of 126 Iraqis were killed in April, according to official figures.