By Xinhua,
Baghdad : Gunmen attacked an anti-Qaida group base in a town in Iraq’s Diyala province on Saturday, killing three of the group members and wounding six others, a provincial police source said.
The attack took place in the morning when some 20 armed men stormed the base of the Awakening Council group in the town of Wajihiyah, 20 km east of the provincial capital Baquba, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Around midday, a woman suicide bomber blew up an explosive vest outside another base of Awakening Council group in central Baquba, killing a policeman and a nearby woman and wounding more than ten other people.
Several council members were among the wounded people. The Awakening Council involves local armed groups, especially some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups, who fight the al-Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities. The attacks in Baquba came as the U.S. and Iraqi security forces are conducting a major offensive in the northern province of Nineveh to uproot al-Qaida militants from their latest strongholds in Iraq, as the coalition claimed.