Gunmen attacked a police commando checkpoint in the city of Samarra in
Salahudin province in north of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding seven
others, a provincial police source said today.
"Dozens of masked gunmen volleyed a checkpoint, manned by police commando
personnel, with mortar rounds and gunfire overnight in the city of Samarra, some
120 km north of Baghdad," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Fierce clashes erupted between the police commando members and the attackers,
which lasted more than an hour and a half, and resulted in the killing of a
woman and an 11-year-old child and the wounding of two commando members, three
children and two people, the source said.
Afterwards, security forces searched the nearby neighborhood of Mu'tasim,
where the police believed the attackers came from, and detained 13 suspected
insurgents, he added.
The police believed that the attackers were affiliated to the al-Qaida in
Iraq network. Al-Qaida's adherence to a hard line form of Sunni Islam is said to
be responsible for indiscriminate killings that left many Iraqi security members
and civilians killed.
