15 killed in Iraq's violence

Fifteen people were killed and eight wounded in separate attacks in Iraq on Wednesday, police said. In the northern province of Nineveh, four soldiers were killed, including an officer, when gunmen using assault rifles attacked their checkpoint in southeast of the provincial capital city of Mosul, some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. In a separate incident, a primary school principal was shot dead by gunmen in front of his house in eastern Mosul, the source said. Meanwhile, gunmen shot dead a civilian in a village south of Mosul, while a police force found unidentified bodies of two young men in eastern the city, with bullet holes in their heads and chests, the source added. In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, three policemen were killed and four wounded when gunmen attacked a checkpoint near the town of Buhruz, just south of the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, a provincial police source anonymously told Xinhua. Separately, an official of the Sunni endowment office, responsible for running the Sunni mosques, was killed with his wife in a roadside bomb explosion near their car in the city of Kan'an, some 20 km east of Baquba, the source said. In addition, a child was killed and four people were wounded when two roadside bombs went off near two houses in the eastern suburb of the city of Maqdadiyah, some 40 km northeast of Baquba, the source added. In southern Iraq, gunmen shot dead a Sunni imam near his mosque in the town of Abu al-Khasib in southeast of the oil-hub city of Basra, some 550 km south of Baghdad, an official from the Sunni endowment told reporters. Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in recent years, which raises fears that the country is sliding back to full- blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.