7 killed in attacks on Iraqi security forces

Seven people were killed and 10 others wounded in separate bomb attacks targeting Iraqi security forces in northern central Iraq on Tuesday, police said. Three policemen were killed and four wounded when a car bomb exploded near a police patrol in the town of al-Riyahd, some 30 km southwest of the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, about 250 km north of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. In Salahudin province, two government-backed Sahwa paramilitary fighters were killed in the morning when a bomb went off in their car in the south of the city of Dowr, some 150 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source anonymously told Xinhua. Minutes later, a roadside bomb detonated when civilians and Iraqi security forces gathered at the site of the first blast, killing a civilian and wounding two others, the source said. The Sahwa militia, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, includes 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 Muslims. In a separate incident, a soldier was killed and four were wounded in a roadside bomb explosion near their military vehicle on a main road in the north of the city of Samarra, some 120 km north of Baghdad, the source added. The assaults came a day after bomb attacks in the north and east of Baghdad, two of them targeting a cafe and a vegetable market, killed 30 people and wounded 104. Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in recent years, which raises fears that the country is sliding back to a full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000. The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq recently reported that over 1,000 Iraqis were killed and more than 2,300 wounded in acts of terrorism and violence in July, the deadliest month in more than five years.