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6 people killed in attacks in Iraq

15 July 2013 18:42 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Six people were killed and 15 wounded Monday in two attacks north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, police said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

One of the attacks occurred in the afternoon when two mortar rounds landed near young men who were gathering to swim on the bank of the Tigris river in the city of Samarra, some 110 km north of Baghdad, killing four of them and wounding 10 others, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Young men used to swim at the bank of the river in the afternoon to escape the summer temperatures which usually soar to almost 50 degrees Celsius in Iraq.

In a separate incident, two soldiers were killed and five wounded when a suicide truck bomber struck their checkpoint at the entrance of al-Riyadh town, which located west of the northern city of Kirkuk, some 250 km north of Baghdad, a local police source anonymously told Xinhua.

Earlier in the day, the police said that an anti-terrorism police officer and two policemen were killed and eight people wounded in separate bombings and shooting in Kirkuk, Baghdad and Iraq's eastern province of Diyala.

The attacks came in the wake of violent attacks swept the country on Sunday evening which killed some 40 people and wounded over 137.

Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in five years, as the past four days of attacks left more than 160 people dead and over 370 others wounded.

The spike in bloodshed raised fears that Iraq is sliding back toward a full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when the monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.