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9 killed in attacks in Iraq

21 October 2013 17:37 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Nine people were killed and 21 wounded in separate attacks across Iraq, including a suicide bombing, police said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The deadliest attack occurred in the morning in Iraq's western province of Anbar when two suicide bombers blew up their explosive vests at the police command of the city of Fallujah, some 50 km west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The suicide bombings were followed by mortar barrage and small arms fire by gunmen on the site, sparking fierce clashes between the guards and the attackers, the source said.

The clashes forced the attackers to resort to the nearby building of electricity department in the central city and took four employees hostage, the source added.

After a few hours of clashes, the Iraqi security forces took control of the building and freed the four after killing two gunmen and arresting three others, he said.

The coordinated attacks in Fallujah prompted the provincial operations command to block all the city entrances and impose indefinite curfew, the source added.

Insurgent attacks continue in the volatile Sunni Arab area in west of Baghdad that stretches through Anbar province to Iraq's western borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

In a separate incident, a member of a government-backed Sahwa paramilitary group was shot dead by a sniper while the group member was manning a checkpoint on a main road in western the city of Samarra, some 120 km north of Baghdad, a local police source anonymously told Xinhua.

Elsewhere, a soldier was critically wounded by a sniper shot at a checkpoint on a highway in west of Salahudin's provincial capital city of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source told Xinhua.

In addition, gunmen planted four bombs at the house of a leader of a Sahwa group in the town of Siniyah, some 200 km north of Baghdad, and blew them up, wounding five family members, including two women and a child, and destroying part of the house, the source said.

The Sahwa militia, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups, who turned their rifles against the al-Qaida network after Sahwa's leaders became dismayed by al- Qaida's brutality and religious zealotry in the country.

Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in recent years, which raises fears that the country is sliding back to the full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.

The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq has said that almost 6,000 civilians were killed and over 14,000 others injured in Iraq from January to September this year.