3 killed, 9 wounded in attacks in Iraq

Two soldiers and a civilian were killed, and nine people wounded in separate bombings and shootings in Iraq on Saturday, the police said. Two soldiers were killed and another wounded when gunmen attacked their checkpoint in northern the city of Mosul, some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. One of the attackers was also wounded by the exchange of fire between the soldiers and the gunmen, the source said. In a separate incident, gunmen broke into the house of Ali Abdullah, a local leading figure in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki' s Shiite party of al-Dawa, in a village located some 15 km south of Mosul, wounding four of his family members before they fled the scene, the source added. Abdullah was not at home when the gunmen attacked his house, he said. Separately, a taxi driver was wounded when a roadside bomb detonated near his car in western Mosul, he said, adding that the blast apparently missed a police patrol which had just past and hit the taxi car instead. Elsewhere, unidentified gunmen using silenced weapons shot dead a young man in front of his house in central the city of Fallujah, some 50 km west of Baghdad, a police source in the city anonymously told Xinhua. Meanwhile, a roadside bomb struck an Iraqi army vehicle in Tarmiyah area, some 40 km north of Baghdad, damaging the vehicle and wounding two soldiers aboard, a local police source said. Violence is still common in the Iraqi cities despite the dramatic decrease since its peak in 2006 and 2007, when the country was engulfed in sectarian killings.