Nine killed in Iraq bomb attacks

Nine people were killed and 10 wounded in bomb attacks, mainly targeting security forces in Iraq Tuesday, police said.

In northern Iraq, five policemen were killed and seven wounded in two suicide bomb attacks targeting a federal police base in the city of Mosul, the capital of Iraq's northern province of Nineveh, a provincial police source told Xinhua.

The attack occurred in the morning when two suicide bombers blew up their explosives-laden vests among a crowd of policemen at their base in the western part of Mosul, some 400 km north of Iraq's capital Baghdad, the source said.

Iraqi security forces cordoned off the scene and imposed curfew for several hours in the western part of the city, the source added.

The Sunni-majority Nineveh province has long been a stronghold of insurgent groups, including Al Qaeda militants, since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In Iraq's Salahudin province, two soldiers were killed and three wounded in a roadside bomb explosion near an army patrol in the city of Baiji, some 200 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source told Xinhua.

Also in the province, a woman and a child were killed in a roadside bomb blast which missed the car of a leader of a government-backed Sahwa paramilitary group, who escaped the attack unharmed near the city of Samarra, some 120 km north of Baghdad, the source said.

The Sahwa militia, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-US Sunni insurgent groups, who turned their guns against the Al Qaeda network after the latter adopted hardline Islam and resorted to indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.

Iraq is witnessing its worst violence in recent years. According to the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, a total of 8,868 Iraqis, including 7,818 civilians and civilian police personnel, were killed in 2013, the highest annual death toll in years.