Insurgents set off two bomb attacks in Iraq on Saturday, killing 10 people, most of them members of security forces, officials told AFP. A roadside bomb attack targeted a patrol of Kurdish peshmerga forces north-east of Baghdad and killed six of them including a top commander, an Iraqi Kurdish official said.
The attack took place in an area called Now Dorman on the western outskirts of the town of Khanaqin near the Iranian border. Mahmud Singawi, member of the peshmerga committee in the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, said one of those killed was the commander of peshmerga forces in Khanaqin.
"Colonel Zulfiqar was killed by the terrorists in the ambush along with his son Horman who was a lieutenant," Singawi told AFP giving only the first names of the two men. Tension between Baghdad and Kurdish leaders flared in the past few weeks after Iraqi forces demanded that peshmerga forces hand over to them the security control of Khanaqin, a town claimed by both the Arabs and the Kurds.
Iraqi forces are currently involved in a massive military crackdown in Diyala, the province surrounding Khanaqin, targeting al Qaeda fighters. Also on Satuday a roadside bomb attack near a checkpoint in eastern Baghdad killed three policemen and a member of a local group fighting al Qaeda, security officials said.
The attack in Camp Sarah neighbourhood left another eight people wounded, including five civilians, they said, adding that three cars were also burnt in the explosion. The officials said the checkpoint was jointly manned by Iraqi policemen and the fighters from the anti-Qaeda group.
The latest bombings come a day after 31 people were slaughtered in a suicide truck bombing near a police station in the Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad. Insurgents have managed to carry out attacks across Iraq despite a series of military assaults. The assaults have helped curb the overall violence in the country which is currently at a four-year low.