Isis kills Iraqi police chief and 29 Kurds at security HQ

Two attacks in one day show the jihadist group’s ability to inflict widespread damage, despite US-led air strikes

Suspected Isis bombers assassinated an Iraqi provincial police chief and killed 28 people in an attack on a Kurdish security headquarters on Sunday, a second straight day of mass attacks that killed scores.

The two attacks, in the north and west of the country, showed the jihadist group’s ability to inflict damage on both the forces of the autonomous Kurdish region and the central government, despite US-led air strikes.

Isis claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a Kurdish security compound in the north, saying it had sent three foreign bombers: a German, a Saudi and a Turk, according to SITE, a group that monitors jihadi announcements. Hospital sources said Kurdish Peshmerga security forces and civilians were among the 28 killed in the attack in Qara Tappa, a mainly Kurdish town in the north of Diyala province, an ethnically and religiously mixed battleground area. As many as 90 people were wounded in the attack, which hit an administrative compound of Kurds that control the area.

In the west, a bomb blast killed the chief of police of Anbar province, the vast, mainly Sunni region of the Euphrates valley that has been one of the main battlefields between government forces and Isis fighters for months.

The police commander, General Ahmad Sadak al-Dulaimi, was on patrol in an area where government forces have fought against Isis near a village 15km west of the provincial capital Ramadi, when a blast hit his convoy.

Reuters