Baghdad - At least three tribal policemen were injured Sunday
when a female suicide bomber targeted a centre of a tribal police
squad in the volatile Diyala province to the north-east of the Iraqi
capital Baghdad.
The bomber wearing an explosives belt hit the centre of one of the
police units known as Awakening Councils in Wajihiyah near Baquba, 45
kilometres north-east of Baghdad, police sources told the Voices of
Iraq news agency.
Three tribal policemen were injured in the attack.
At least 16 women have carried out suicide bombings in Diyala, a
mixed Sunni-Shiite province, in the past six months, according to
figures released by its municipal council.
The last of such attacks was on June 22 when a woman blew herself
up near a local government building in the centre of Baquba, killing
at least 13 people and injuring 30.
Awakening Councils are US-backed police volunteer units set up by
clans in Sunni-dominated areas in Iraq to fight Sunni extremist
insurgents in their provinces.
The councils have been partly credited for a recent decrease in
violence in Baghdad and surrounding areas but attacks on them have
increased.
Meanwhile twin blasts targeting police in restive cities in
northern Iraq on Sunday left seven policemen dead and nine people
injured, including six civilians, according to security officials.
In the first incident, a car bomb hit a police patrol in Duluiyah
in Salahaddin province, killing seven policemen and injuring three,
local security sources told the Voices of Iraq VOI news agency.
Three other policemen were injured in the attack.
The car, parked on the side of the road, was detonated when the
patrol drove by on its way to secure a main road, the sources said.
In the other blast in Kirkuk, six civilians were injured by a bomb
that targeted the car of the city's emergency police chief, VOI cited
security sources as saying.
In the northern province of Salahaddin, another hotbed of Sunni
insurgency, a mass grave containing 25 bodies, six of them women, was
uncovered on Saturday in Samarra, according to police.
The grave was found by accident in the Thirthar area during a joint
routine inspection operation by police and members of the local
Awakening council west of Samarra, police officer Muthana Shaker said.
Some of the bodies were decomposed. No identity documents were
found with the bodies.
The area where the grave was uncovered had been previously under
the control of militants from the al-Qaeda in Iraq group.
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