A total of 17 people were killed and some 53 others wounded in separate bomb attacks across Iraq, including an overnight suicide bombing, police said on Wednesday.
One of the attacks took place in northern Iraq when two car bomb explosions at noon struck the city of Kirkuk, some 250 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, leaving eight people killed, among them two women and two children, and 14 others injured, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The ethnically-mixed province of Kirkuk and its capital city Kirkuk are part of the disputed areas between the Kurds and both Arabs and Turkomans. The Kurds want to incorporate the areas on the edge of their Kurdistan region, but their move is fiercely opposed by Baghdad government.
In Iraq's Salahudin province, a police officer and a policeman were killed and three other officers wounded when a bomb detonated near convoy while they were on a tour to check the security measures in a secondary school in the provincial capital city of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, a provincial police source said.
Some 20 students, who were doing the final examinations for their secondary school, were also wounded by the blast which smashed the windows of several classes in the building, the source said.
Also in the province, two policemen were killed and six others wounded when a booby-trapped car detonated near a passing police patrol outside the city of Sulaiman Beg, some 90 km east of Tikrit, the source added.
Separately, three people were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded at a thoroughfare in Mansour district in the western part of Baghdad, a police source said.
Earlier in the day, a police source from Iraq's western province of Anbar told Xinhua that an overnight suicide bomb attack killed one of top leaders of the Iraqi government-backed Sahwa paramilitary groups, three security officers and one bodyguard, along with wounding seven security members.
The attack occurred late on Tuesday night when a suicide bomber hugged Mohammed Khamis Abu Risha and blew up his explosive vest among a crowd of Sahwa leaders and senior security officers, who were on tour at a residential area in the western part of the provincial capital Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad, the source said.
The Sahwa militia, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, consists of some Sunni armed groups, who previously were part of powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups after the U. S.-led invasion to Iraq in 2003.
Most of those groups had turned their rifles against the al- Qaida network and cooperated with the U.S. troops after al- Qaida adopted hardline Islam and exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.