Gunmen assassinated a high-ranking Iraqi police officer on Sunday in southwestern Baghdad and injured his bodyguards, police said. Col. Yassin Ibrahim Jawad was heading to his work at 8 a.m. when the attackers sprayed his car with bullets in Baghdad's neighborhood of Al-Baya, police Col. Sa'ad Abdul Razaq said.
Nadiyah Khalid, a doctor at the capital's al-Yarmouk hospital, said that one of the injured was in critical situation.
North of the Iraqi capital, a guardsman was killed and a civilian wounded when a patrol hit a roadside bomb late Saturday between the cities of Samarra and Duluiya. Elsewhere, a senior administrator in the town of Al-Shurqat west of the northern oil city of Kirkuk was kidnapped as he was traveling to the northern city of Mosul, police said.
Meanwhile, Gen. Babaker B. Shawkat Zebari, the Iraqi army's chief of staff said in an interview on Sunday that foreign fighters are still entering Iraq from Syria. "I don't know if the (Syrian) government is closing its eyes or the terrorists are finding their ways to cross," he said, according to the AP. Zibari said six Arabs using forged Iraqi identity cards and carrying explosives were captured near the Syrian border on Thursday.
His remarks came a day after Najaf's police commander, Ghaleb al-Jazaeri, said they arrested an Iraqi who confessed to receiving training in a camp in Syria under the supervision of a Syrian military officer.
For his part, an official source at the Syrian Foreign Ministry told SANA News Agency that the accusation by the Iraqi police commander in Najaf "is rejected and condemned as irresponsible." The source said that such a statement doesn't deserve comment.
