Two Iraqi militants, known as "Awakening Council" group members, were killed and five people wounded in the city of Samarra in Salahudin province on Sunday, a provincial police source said.
A roadside bomb manually placed near a checkpoint by the local Awakening Council group members went off Sunday morning in Samarra city, killing two group members and wounding three others, a source from Salahudin's operations command told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa in Arabic, consists of some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups, which turned their rifles against the al-Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
In a separate incident, three policemen were wounded when a roadside bombing struck their police patrol in al-Hwaish area near Samarra, some 110 km north of Baghdad, the source said.
Violence and sporadic high-profile attacks are still common in Iraqi cities as part of recent deterioration in security which shaped a setback to the efforts of the Iraqi government to restore normalcy in the country after violence-torn Iraq held parliamentary elections eight months ago.
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