|
Baghdad: Al Qaida is changing tactics in Iraq's volatile Diyala province, the commander of US forces in north Iraq said , on Saturday, shortly after a suicide car bomb killed eight people in a northern oil refining town.
Major General Mark Hertling said Al Qaida fighters driven out of other areas were targeting Diyala using suicide vests and attacking neighbourhood police units. But a spate of attacks there did not reflect a wider surge in violence, he said.
North of Diyala, police said at least eight people were killed in what a Reuters witness said was a suicide car bomb attack in the oil refining city of Baiji in the latest bombing.
Use of suicide vests
The US military also said its soldiers had killed 12 suspected Al Qaida gunmen and detained 13 others in operations north and south of the capital.
Religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala has become one of the epicentres of violence in Iraq after Al Qaida and other fighters were squeezed out of western Al Anbar province, Baghdad and other areas by security crackdowns this year. At least 61 people have been killed and 90 wounded over the past week in five major bombing and shooting attacks in the province, which spans the Tigris and Diyala rivers and spreads east to the Iranian border.
"As far as an upsurge in attacks, we have not seen that," Hertling told Reuters in an e-mail.
"What we have seen is some instances of different types of attacks," he said, referring to the use of suicide vests and "desperate" attacks against neighbourhood police units which the military calls "concerned local citizens".
On Friday, a woman wearing a vest packed with explosives killed 16 people in the Diyala town of Muqdadiya. The attack targeted former Sunni Islamist insurgents who had joined security forces to fight Al Qaida, a rare attack by a female suicide bomber. About 10 Iraqi troops were killed in another attack north of Muqdadiya later on Friday, security officials said.
Violence across Iraq has fallen by 55 per cent since mid-June.The growing use of the concerned local citizens''groups, pioneered in Al Anbar province last year by Sunni Arab tribal shaikhs tired of Al Qaida's indiscriminate killings, have also been credited for sharp falls in violence.
In Baiji, 40 people were also wounded in an attack witnesses blamed on a suicide car bomb at the home of an anti-terrorism official.
A Reuters television cameraman said at least 11 cars were destroyed and 15 houses damaged by the blast.
|
