ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A police force member has died and two more have been injured after a bomb attached to one of their cars exploded in Kirkuk's Askari neighborhood, a police spokesperson told Rudaw. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. “The officer is a colonel who works at the police checkpoints section, and he was on his way to work but a bomb had been attached to his car, which exploded,” Kirkuk police spokesperson Afrasyaw Kamil told Rudaw. The driver of the car was killed in the explosion, Kamil said, but the colonel and his guard survived. The vehicle targeted was a red Peugeot, a security source told local media outlet Kirkuk Now. “The explosion severely injured Colonel Muhanad Tariq, head of the checkpoints section and his driver,” the unnamed security source told the outlet before the driver died from his injuries. Police are investigating the incident, Kamil added, and he did not say who they believed could be responsible for the attack. However, the Islamic State group have launched similar attacks on Kirkuk's security forces since their sweep through swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in the summer of 2014. Though the terrorist group was declared territorially defeated in Iraq in December 2017, its sleeper cells continue to wreak havoc in territories disputed by the governments of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq, conducting hit-and-run attacks, kidnapping, explosions and other activities where Erbil and Baghdad's territorial dispute has created exploitable security vacuums. Saturday's car bomb attack was the second in the space of eight days, after a bomb was attached to a security force vehicle in northeast Kirkuk on April 3. A number of soldiers were killed and injured in the attack, according to Iraqi media reports.
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