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BAGHDAD, Dec. 18 (AP) — An explosive device detonated in northern Iraq on Sunday, killing several members of the Iraqi federal police force who were on patrol, a military spokesman said.
A major officer was among the dead, according to a tweet by spokesman Yahya Rasool. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in the village of Ali al-Sultan in the Riyadh district of Kirkuk province.
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Rasoul did not specify how many people had been killed, but added that Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad al-Sudani had been briefed on the attack. Investigation is ongoing.
A bomb exploded on Wednesday killed three Iraqi soldiers during a security operation in the Talmiya district north of Baghdad. Among those killed was the commander of the 59th Infantry Brigade.
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No one has claimed responsibility for that attack either, but remnants of the Islamic State militant group are active in the region and have claimed similar attacks in Iraq in the past.
IS was defeated and lost all territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq, where its last stronghold in Syria fell to the US-backed movement in 2019. However, the dormant group remained and carried out attacks that killed dozens of Iraqis and Syrians.
In Iraq, militants have successfully exploited a security gap in a northern stretch of territory amid ongoing disputes between Baghdad and Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Rural areas in Kirkuk, Diyala, Nineveh and Salah al-Din governorates are particularly difficult to maintain, where Iraqi security forces are sparsely distributed and Islamic State militants routinely terrorize local residents. Sometimes, due to security breaches, they manage to take over towns overnight. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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