BAGHDAD: Shootings and bombings killed five Iraqi police, including a general, on Wednesday in the latest in a series of attacks targeting the country's security forces, security and medical officials said.
The unrest came after six soldiers were killed nationwide on Tuesday, including a colonel, as insurgents have sought to target senior security officials with assassinations of three top officers in as many days.
In the deadliest of the violence, a spate of bombings in the disputed northern province of Kirkuk killed four policemen and wounded six other security members, police and doctor Abdullah Hassan from Kirkuk city's main hospital said.
Three policemen were killed and three others were wounded by a roadside bomb targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Sarhad Qader, a senior police official in Kirkuk province, as it was passing through the Al-Riyadh town southwest of the eponymous provincial capital. Qader escaped unscathed.
Two separate bomb blasts in souther Kirkuk city, meanwhile, left one policeman dead and three security force members — a policeman and two Kurdish peshmerga members — wounded.
In Baghdad, gunmen killed an Iraqi general on Wednesday morning, the third assassination of a senior security officer in as many days, security and medical officials said.
The murder of Brigadier General Nadhim Tayeh, the head of police emergency responders in west Baghdad, followed an ambush against the convoy of an army colonel a day earlier, and the shooting of a border guards brigadier general in the capital on Monday.
“Several armed men opened fire with silenced pistols against Brigadier General Nadhim Tayeh and killed him immediately while he was driving his private car and wearing civilian clothes,” an interior ministry official said.
A medic at Karkh hospital confirmed Tayeh's assassination.
The latest deaths took to 270 the number of people killed in nationwide attacks so far in August, including 106 members of the security forces, according to an AFP tally based on reports from security and medical officials.
Violence has significantly decreased in Iraq compared to the brutal years of 2006 and 2007, but attacks are still common.