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12 killed, 30 wounded in Iraq's violence

31 July 2013 18:11 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Twelve people were killed and 30 wounded in separate violent attacks in central and northern Iraq, police said on Wednesday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

In Salahudin province, a police officer was killed and eight people were wounded when a booby-trapped car went off near a court in the city of Dowr, south of the provincial capital city of Tikrit, about 170 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

In a separate incident, three government-backed Sahwa paramilitary members were killed and another wounded by gunmen attack on their checkpoint in a village near the city of Hawijah, some 220 km north of Baghdad, a police officer in the city anonymously told Xinhua.

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 the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.

In Baghdad, armed men in a car opened fire apparently at random on pedestrians in the Shiite-dominated district of Ur in the northeastern part of the capital, killing two people and wounding three, a police officer told Xinhua.

Earlier, six people were reportedly killed and 18 wounded in the early hours of the day in a bomb explosion outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad northeastern neighborhood of Husseiniyah.

Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in five years, raising fears that the latest bloodshed is bringing the country back to a full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.