BAGHDAD, (Xinhua): Up to 11 Iraqis were killed and 29 others were wounded in gunfire and a series of bomb attacks across the country on late Saturday and Sunday, the police said.
Abid Khalaf, an Awakening Council group leader, was killed by a sticky bomb planted in his car in Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Two of Khalaf’s bodyguards were wounded by the attack, the source said.
The Awakening Council is a government-backed anti-al-Qaida paramilitary group who fought the al-Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
In Iraq’s eastern province of Diyala, a bomb attached to the car of Ismail Jawad, another government-backed group leader, detonated, killing him and wounding his bodyguard in Jurf al-Milih area, northeast of the provincial capital city of Baquba, a source from the provincial operations command told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
In a separate incident, four policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in the town of Naft-Khana, some 75 km northeast of Baquba, near the Iraqi-Iranian border, the source said.
Diyala province, which stretches from the eastern edges of Baghdad to the Iranian border east of the country, has long been a stronghold for al-Qaida militants and other insurgent groups since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Source: The Muslim News