10 killed in attacks in Iraq

Ten people were killed and 15 wounded in separate bombings and shootings in Iraq on Saturday, the police said. Iraqi security forces killed four gunmen and wounded six others in a search operation in the city of Qaim, near the Iraqi-Syrian border in Iraq's western province of Anbar, a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. In the northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi army officer was killed in a roadside bomb explosion near his patrol in eastern the city, some 400 km north of the capital of Baghdad, a local police source told Xinhua. Separately, two gunmen were killed when a roadside bomb detonated while they were trying to plant it on a main road in the town of Yathrib, some 80 km north of Baghdad, a local police source said. Elsewhere, a physician was shot dead by gunmen while he was driving his car in al-Jihad district in the southwestern part of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source anonymously told Xinhua. In a separate incident, a policeman was killed when a magnetic bomb attached to his car went off in Shulla district in the northwestern part of Baghdad, the source said. In addition, gunmen using assault rifles opened fire on civilians in different areas in Sadr City neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, wounding eight people, the source added. In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, a farmer was killed and his brother wounded in a roadside bomb explosion at their orchard in a village near the provincial capital city of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, a provincial police source said. Iraq is witnessing its worst eruption of violence in five years, raising fears that the latest bloodshed is sliding the country back toward a full-blown civil conflict that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when the monthly death toll sometimes exceeded 3,000.