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Baghdad, Sep 4 (IANS) Two Iraqi army officers and three soldiers were killed and three other people wounded in separate attacks in northern and eastern Iraq on Tuesday, police said. A roadside bomb went off near a military patrol in south of the city of Tuz-Khurmato, some 200 km north of Baghdad, killing an officer and three soldiers, a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. Two soldiers were also wounded by the blasts which also damaged two military vehicles, the source said. In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, gunmen shot dead an Iraqi army lieutenant colonel near his house in Jurf al-Melih area, near the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, a source from Diyala's operations command anonymously told Xinhua. In a separate incident, gunmen wounded a member of a government- backed Awakening Council group, near al-Hadeed area, some 10 km northwest of Baquba, the source said. The Awakening Council group, also known as Sons of Iraq movement or Sahwa, consists of mostly anti-US Sunni insurgent militant groups, who turned their rifles to fight Al Qaeda network after Sahwa's leaders became dismayed by Al Qaeda's brutality and religious zealotry in the country. Violence in Iraq has ebbed from its climax in 2006 and 2007, when sectarian conflicts pushed the country to the brink of a civil war, but tensions and sporadic shootings and bombings are still seen across the country.
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