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BAGHDAD — The head of a key U.S.-backed Sunni group was killed Monday in a double suicide bombing that claimed at least 11 other lives and highlighted the deadly precision of attacks on Sunni leaders choosing to oppose al-Qaida in Iraq.

The main target — a former police colonel who led resistance to al-Qaida in one of its former Baghdad strongholds — was first embraced by a bomber posing as a friend. Seconds later, the attacker stepped back and triggered an explosion, a witness said.

A suicide car bomber then struck as rescuers tried to evacuate the wounded. At least 28 people were injured in the twin blasts — the latest in a spate of attacks against Sunnis who have joined a U.S.-supported movement against extremists and credited with helping sharply reduce violence around Iraq.

But the mounting al-Qaida backlash has stoked worries of a wider showdown brewing as extremists try to reclaim havens and intimidate the so-called "Awakening Councils" opposing them. In an audiotape released Dec. 29, Osama bin Laden warned that Sunni Arabs who join the groups will "suffer in life and in the afterlife."

Monday's bombing occurred at the entrance of a Sunni Endowment office, a government agency that cares for Sunni mosques and shrines, and near an Awakening Council office in Baghdad's northern Azamiyah district, which had been a stronghold of insurgents and a safe haven for al-Qaida in Iraq.

As people rushed to aid the wounded, a suicide car bomb exploded just yards away, said Baghdad's chief military spokesman, Brig. Qassim al-Moussawi.

Sunni Endowment leader Ahmed Abdul Ghafur al-Samarrai — who is from the same tribe as the colonel — blamed bin Laden for encouraging the attack. But he said the bloodshed Monday had "increased Iraqis' strength . . . against those who want to create sectarian divisions."

The switch of allegiance by insurgents in Azamiyah was one of the most significant in a series of similar moves across Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods.

Azamiyah is home to Iraq's most revered Sunni shrine, the mosque of Imam Abu Hanifa, and many in the area served as officers in Saddam Hussein's military and security agencies, giving an edge to the insurgency after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

In another development, Maj. Andrew Olmsted's "Final Post" was published online — after the Rocky Mountain News blogger was killed in Iraq.

Olmsted died Thursday with another soldier, Capt. Thomas J. Casey, 32, of Albuquerque, when rebels attacked with small arms near Sadiyah, the military said.

Olmsted, who began writing for the News on May 21 and described himself as a libertarian, had written what he called "Final Post" about his death. He asked a friend to post it on his Web site AndrewOlmsted.com if he died in Iraq.

In it, Olmsted, 37, warned against making his death an argument for or against the war.

"My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side," he wrote. "I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support."

•blogs.rockymountainnews.com/denver/iraqiarmy

•www.andrewolmsted.com