Eight Kurdish Peshmerga forces were reportedly killed and five others wounded Thursday in an attack targeting a brigade headquarters in the Iraqi province of Diyala, media reports said Thursday, according to dpa. "Unknown gunmen launched an attack on the premises of a Peshmerga brigade in Qara Taba district, 85 kilometres north-east of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province," a spokesman for the Peshmerga forces, Jabar Yawar, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). Three attackers were killed in the clashes that erupted between the two sides for a couple of hours, Iraq's independent al-Sharkiya TV reported. Qara Taba is an ethnically-mixed town of Turkomans, Arabs and Kurds. Separately, a total of 32 gunmen, including seven al-Qaeda members, were captured during a wide-ranging raid by joint Iraqi forces, a senior security source told VOI Thursday. Baquba is about 60 kilometres north-east of the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Seven civilians were kidnapped at a fake checkpoint on the road linking Kirkuk to the Iraqi capital, a police source said Thursday. Unidentified armed men staged a fake checkpoint near Tuz Khormato in Tamim province, taking seven vehicle passengers as hostages to an unknown destination, VOI reported. Tuz Khormato, a home to a potpourri of Kurds, Turkomans, and Arabs, lies 180 kilometres north-east of Baghdad. In Mosul, about 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, a key member of al-Qaeda affiliate the Islamic State of Iraq, who was allegedly behind an attack on members of the country's Yazidi minority, was arrested, an Iraqi army general said Thursday. Hatim Sultan al-Hadidi, whose nom de guerre is Abu-Ali, was captured in an overnight raid in Mosul, the commander of the Iraqi army's fourth brigade, General Nur al-Din Hussein, told the Voices of Iraq VOI news agency. Al-Hadidi was behind the killing of 23 Yazidi workers in April in the north-east of Mosul, the general said. Yazidis are ethnic Kurds who live mostly in north-western Iraq and practise an ancient Middle Eastern religion. The Islamic State of Iraq is an extremist Sunni group with links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network. In the central Wassit province, gunmen killed a middle-aged woman outside her home in Kut, 180 kilometres south-east of Baghdad, VOI quoted security sources as saying. Police are investigating the motives behind her killing. US-led coalition forces killed three terrorist suspects and detained another 19 in operations against al-Qaeda in the Tigris river valley, the US military reported. Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities released 73 detainees detained after armed clashes had broken out between the Shiite Mahdi Army, loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Iraqi security forces in Karbalaa, the city governor Aqil al-Khazali said Thursday. The men were released Wednesday after the investigations cleared them, al-Khazali said in a press conference. A number of other detainees are still being interrogated and those who turn out to be innocent will bet set free, he added. In August, about 50 Iraqis were killed and hundreds others injured when armed clashes broke out near the two Shiite holy Shrines of Imam Hussein and his brother during a religious festival. Al-Sadr announced a freeze in Mahdi Army activities following the fighting.
