Baghdad - At least 33 people have been killed in separated incidents across Iraq, reports said Wednesday. Ten civilians were killed in a US military raid on Hillah city, while at least 23 other Iraqis, including policemen, were killed in a series of attacks across the conflict-torn Iraqi cities.
Iraqi police sources said US helicopters raided Hillah city, 100 kilometres south of Baghdad, in Babel province, killing five women and four children and damaging a house.
The same sources said US troops stormed a Sunni mosque also in Hillah, killing its imam, Sheikh Hosni al-Janabi, but without providing a reason for the attack.
Raids and inspections by US troops in Hillah continued Wednesday.
In a twin blast in Tikrit city, about 170 kilometres north-west of Baghdad, at least seven Iraqis were killed and five wounded, including some policemen, witnesses said.
Two car bombs went off consecutively targeting Iraqi cars queuing outside a gas station and another in a car park downtown in Sharqat district, the witnesses added.
The two blasts caused damage to the nearby buildings and stores.
In a village near Qadaa Sinjar in the Nineveh province, around 250 kilometres north-west of Baghdad, meanwhile, 10 civilians were reported killed and nine wounded in a car bomb explosion.
Four of those wounded were in a critical condition, the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency reported, citing hospital sources.
Qadaa Sinjar is inhabited by a large population of Yazidis, members of a religious sect who do not follow the tenets of Islam and who are concentrated in the northern Iraqi villages around Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province.
Yazidi villages had earlier been attacked in a series of simultaneous explosions in August in which more than 500 people were killed.
In other developments in Diyala province, 57 kilometres north of Baghdad, five Iraqis belonging to the same family were killed overnight in hours after they were reported kidnapped.
An official from the province told VOI that an armed group belonging to an extremist network was responsible for the killings.
The official said the group had set up a fake checkpoint from which it ambushed the family, who were travelling along the main road of Qadaa Baladrose, south-east of Diyala's capital Baquba.
The victims were found with bullet wounds, blindfolds and their hands tied together. The police source did not disclose the name of the suspected armed group.
In a similar incident in Diyala province, an Iraqi was killed and four others from one family were wounded after gunmen had planted explosive charges in a house near theirs.
In northern Diyala, a hospital received the dead bodies of three Iraqis, including a 3-year-old child, a medical source said.
Also Wednesday, 25 unidentified bodies were buried one month after they had been found with no traces of identity.
Iraqi army forces meanwhile detained 22 suspects in crackdowns in western Baquba.
Military commander Babker Zibari said in statements broadcast by al-Iraqiya state television that "Baquba came under full control after the recent security operations."
Joint Iraqi-US forces had launched the security operation named Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Diyala province on June 19 in a bid to rid Baquba and other cities from militant belonging to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
A US soldier, meanwhile, was killed in a small-arms fire attack while conducting combat operations in east Baghdad, the US military reported Wednesday.
In other news, US troops on Tuesday raided a village near Tikrit arresting Mohammad Mezher al-Shmri, the owner and editor-in-chief of al-Faisal newspaper, and his son, a media source told VOI Wednesday.
According to the source, the reasons behind his arrests were unknown. The US military did not comment on the detention.
Al-Shemri founded the newspaper, which is published in Kirkuk, in 2004, and in 2006 was elected as head of the Iraqi Journalists' Association.
Meanwhile, the Paris-based freedom of press advocate Reporters Without Borders has published a report saying that two Iraqi journalists were murdered during the past week.
Television journalist Jawad al-Daami, of the satellite TV station al-Baghdadiya, was shot dead in Baghdad on September 23 in the western suburb of al-Qadissiya, three days after the killing of Mohammed Ghanem Ahmed of radio Dar al-Salam in the northern city of Mosul.
Ghanem Ahmed was gunned down near a mosque in the Muharibin suburb of eastern Mosul and his attackers escaped. He was the sixth journalist to be killed only in Mosul this year.
"The plight of the Iraqi media continues to be disastrous," the organization said. "Fifty-five journalists and media assistants have been killed so far this year."
The organization deemed Baghdad the "most deadly city for journalists," with 35 reporters having been killed in the capital this year.
Based on recent statistics published by Reporters Without Borders, since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, 203 media workers have been killed and 83 kidnapped, 14 of whom are reportedly still being held by their captors.
