BAGHDAD, May 30 (Xinhua) -- A total of two people were killed and eight others wounded on Thursday in two attacks by Islamic State (IS) militants in the Iraqi provinces of Diyala and Kirkuk, an Iraqi military and a provincial official said.
In the northern province of Kirkuk, IS militants attacked a village and set fire to its farms in the south of the provincial capital Kirkuk, some 250 km north of Baghdad, sparking a clash with the villagers, a statement by the media office of the Joint Operations Command said.
The clash resulted in the killing of a villager and the wounding of seven others, the statement added.
Recently, the extremist IS militants frequently pursued a tactic of collecting taxes from farmers or killing them and burning their farms and crops in agricultural areas across the provinces of Salahudin, Nineveh, Diyala and Kirkuk.
Separately, IS militants before dawn attacked a security checkpoint near the town of Abu Saida, some 90 km northeast of Baghdad, killing a policeman and wounding another, Ahmed al-Rubaie, a member of Diyala's provincial council, told Xinhua.
The security forces launched a probe into attack and carried out a search for the attackers in the surrounding area, al-Rubaie said.
Despite repeated military operations in Diyala, some IS militants are still hiding in rugged areas near the border with Iran, and in the sprawling areas extending from the western part of the province to the Himreen mountain range in the northern part of the province.
The security situation in Iraq was dramatically improved after Iraqi security forces fully defeated the extremist IS militants across the country late in 2017.
IS remnants, however, have since melted in urban areas or resorted to deserts and rugged areas, carrying out guerilla attacks against security forces and civilians despite military operations from time to time to hunt them down.
