By Xinhua,
Baghdad : A suicide bomb attack and mortar barrage in Diyala province on Tuesday killed three people and wounded ten others, police said.
A suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up at about 7 a.m. local time (0400 GMT) at a house in the al-Bakir neighborhood in the town of Mandili, near the Iranian border, a source from the town’s police station told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The suicide bomber targeted Sheikh Talib al-Nadawi, the chieftain of Nadawi Sunni tribe and head of the local U.S.-backed Awakening Council group, the source said.
Nadawi who was at the house as a guest escaped unhurt, but a female child was killed and two people were wounded, he said.
The Awakening Councils are armed groups of local neighborhoods, including 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.
In separate incident, a mortar round landed on a house in the town of Baladruz, some 70 km northeast of Baghdad, killing two family members and wounding eight others, a provincial police source told Xinhua.
Diyala province, which stretches from the eastern edges of Baghdad to the Iranian border, has long been the hot bed of insurgency and a stronghold for al-Qaida in Iraq network.