Unrest kills three in Iraq's Mosul
AFP
MOSUL- Iraqi gunmen killed two civilians in the main northern city of Mosul on Sunday as a sapper died trying to defuse a roadside bomb, police said.
Machine gun fire felled one civilian outside his home in the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab west of the city, police said, without giving further details on the victim's identity.
Iraqi police commandos guard a bridge in Baghdad.
The army engineer was killed and a second wounded as they tried to make safe an improvised bomb planted by insurgents in the Sahaba neighbourhood in the west of the city.
Mosul has remained a hotbed of insurgent activity even as levels of political violence have fallen off in much of the rest of the country.
On Saturday, a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed one officer and wounded five.
On Thursday, three suicide bombers killed four police and a soldier in separate attacks in the city.
The province is split between Sunni Arab and Kurdish communities who are bitterly divided over the ambitions of Kurdish leaders to incorporate large parts of it into their autonomous region in the north. It also has Assyrian, Shabak, Turkmen and Yazidi minorities.
Al-Qaeda has exploited the ethnic and confessional differences to make the province one of its enduring strongholds in Iraq.
------------------------------------------------------------------