Baghdad, May 12 (IANS) A senior officer from the Kurdish security forces, known as Peshmerga, was killed on Tuesday in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq’s oil-rich province of Kirkuk, a Kurdish security source told Xinhua news agency.
Maj. Gen. Salah Ibrahim Delman, commander of a Peshmerga brigade, was killed when a roadside bomb struck a convoy of military vehicles at a village near the town of Daqouq, some 40 km south of provincial capital city of Kirkuk, the source said.
Two more Peshmerga members were killed and six others wounded by the blast, the source said.
Kirkuk, home to mixed ethnicities of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and others, is being contested.
The Kurds want to expand their autonomous region in northern Iraq, including Kirkuk and other areas in the provinces of Nineveh, Salahudin and Diyala, a demand fiercely opposed by the Iraqi government.
The Islamic State terrorist group in August captured Gwer and a nearby town, posing an imminent threat to Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan region, but the militants have been pushed back by Peshmerga fighters with foreign air support.