Two bombs planted on the first floor of the house of Arshad Al-Salehi, a Turkomen member of the Iraqiya political alliance, exploded shortly after sunrise but missed their target, said Kirkuk police chief Maj. Gen. Jamal Tahir.

Though Al-Salehi and his family were inside, they all were sleeping on the second floor and nobody was injured, Tahir said.  Two more bombs were found upstairs but did not detonate.

“That was absolutely a terrorist attack meant to assassinate me and to kill my family,” said Al-Salehi, who was chosen this week as the leader of the Turkomen Front, a local party in Kirkuk.

Ethnic tensions have long simmered in Kirkuk among Kurds, Turkomen and Arabs, who each want to claim the city’s power as theirs. Located about 290 kilometers north of Baghdad, Kirkuk sits atop of about a third of Iraq’s oil reserves.

Officials say they are now questioning more than 30 guards stationed near the house in central Kirkuk.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, an Iraqi Army patrol hit a roadside bomb that wounded six people, officials said. Violence has dropped dramatically around Iraq over the last several years, but extremists are seizing on the country’s unstable political horizon to raise new threats against lawmakers and security forces.

Nearly five months after Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki seated his government, Parliament approved three candidates for vice presidents on Thursday. The decision adds a new vice presidency post to the already top-heavy government, which has 44 Cabinet ministers.

Vice Presidents Tariq Al-Hashemi, a Sunni, and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite, remained in the positions they have held for the last four years, and Khudayer Al-Khuzaie, a Shiite from Nuri Al-Maliki’s Dawa party, got the third seat.

Iraq is still without permanent defense or interior ministers — two of the top posts — as Al-Maliki and Parliament bicker over whom to name.