RAMADI: A suicide car bomber on Sunday killed four Iraqi policemen and wounded four others near the predominantly Sunni Arab western city of Ramadi, a police official said.
The attack happened around 10.30 a.m. (0830 GMT) 10 km north east of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province.
“The suicide bomber blew himself up at the gate at the entrance to the police station, causing the casualties,” the police official said.
Anbar, Iraq’s biggest province, became the theater of a brutal war focused on the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, while several towns along the Euphrates river valley became insurgent strongholds and later safe havens for fighters.
Meanwhile, an armed gang kidnapped a Christian doctor from his home near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul overnight as his children looked on, police said on Sunday.
“The gang kidnapped the doctor, Mahasin Bashir, in his home late at night as his children watched, and then they put him into a car,” a police officer said on condition of anonymity.
The officer said the abduction happened in the predominantly Christian town of Bartala, around 20 km from Mosul in northern Iraq’s Nineveh province.
He added that the motives behind the kidnapping were not immediately clear.
Bashir worked in a hospital in a nearby Christian town, Hamdania.
According to Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, around half of Mosul’s Christian community -— some 2,275 families -— abandoned their homes and jobs in October to take shelter in Christian villages.
