Six members of a Sunni Awakening Council group were killed and six wounded in two attacks in Iraq's eastern province of Diyala early on Thursday, a provincial police source said.
An apparently coordinated attack took place at about 3:00 a.m. (0000 GMT) when gunmen believed to be al-Qaida militants stormed a base of the council group in a village near the town of Mansouriyah, some 40 km east of the provincial capital city of Baquba, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The attackers opened fire from their machine-guns and rocket propelled grenades on the group members, killing four of them and wounding two others, the source said.
Afterwards, a roadside bomb struck a force of the local group reinforcement, killing the group leader and his aide and wounding two more group fighters, the source added.
Iraqi security forces sealed off the area and conducted a search operation looking for the attackers who fled the scene, he said.
In a separate incident, gunmen attacked a checkpoint manned by members of another Awakening Council group in a village near the town of Abu Saidah, north of Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, wounding two group members, the source added.
The Awakening Council group consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups, who fought the al- Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
Diyala province, which stretches from the eastern edges of Baghdad to the Iranian border east of the country, has long been a stronghold for al-Qaida militants and other insurgent groups since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 despite repeated U.S. and Iraqi military operations against them.
The attacks came a day after a series of deadly attacks across the country, mostly targeted the Iraqi security forces, left 64 people dead and wounded some 274 others.