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Gunmen, bombings kill 6 in Baghdad Sunni district

29 July 2010 17:56 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Three Iraqi soldiers and three civilians were killed and 14 others were wounded in gunfire and five bomb explosions in Baghdad’s northern Sunni district on Thursday, an Interior Ministry source said, APA reports quoting news.xinhuanet.com website.

A group of gunmen on Thursday afternoon stormed an Iraqi army checkpoint in Adhamiyah district, and shot dead three soldiers, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The attack was followed by five bomb explosions which ripped through the district successively, killing three civilians and wounding 14 people, including seven policemen, the source said.

The five blasts targeted some of the police checkpoints and their foot patrols in different part of the district, the source added.

Adhamiyah is a Sunni enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods, which has long been a stronghold for Sunni insurgents fighting the U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

However, the enclave has been calm for more than two years since some Sunni insurgents turned to fight the Qaida militants who carried out indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni communities in Iraq.

Earlier in the day, the police said seven people were killed and 24 others were injured in separate attacks in central and northern Iraq, including a suicide truck bomb that targeted an Iraqi military base in Sherqat town of Salahudin province.

Attacks are still common in Iraqi cities as part of recent deterioration in security which shaped a setback to the efforts of the Iraqi government to restore normalcy in the country more than four months after violence-torn Iraq held parliamentary elections on March 7.