Kirkuk mosque bombing kills child, wounds five others

KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region – A young boy was killed and five people wounded by a bomb blast at a mosque in Iraq’s northern city of Kirkuk late Saturday evening, a police official told Rudaw.

“A bomb placed at the Safa mosque in the Yaki Hozairan neighborhood of Kirkuk killed a child and wounded five more people,” Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir, head of Kirkuk’s Suburban Police, told Rudaw.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

 

A Rudaw reporter at the scene said the dead child was a six-year-old boy.

 

Last month, a boy suicide bomber in his early teens was arrested by Kurdish security forces in Kirkuk before detonating his explosives belt, after two other suicide attacks on the same day in the Kurdish city.

 

The attacks in Kirkuk follow recent successful military offensives by Peshmerga forces against the Islamic State (ISIS) group, which has been in retreat after losing large swathes of territory to the Kurdish forces.