AFP

BAGHDAD UNKNOWN gunmen firing Kalashnikovs and PK machineguns ambushed a police patrol on Thursday in north Iraq, killing two policemen and three civilians and wounding six more, a top police officer said.

The gunmen ambushed the police patrol about 40 kilometres (24 miles) south of the northern city of Kirkuk, killing two policemen and three civilians and wounding three policemen and three civilians, Brigadier General Sarhad Qader said.

The gunmen fired from three cars, Qader said, adding that they battled police for about 30 minutes before managing to flee.

The Al Qaeda and Ansar al Sunna militant groups are active in the area, Qader said.

Ethnically divided and oilrich Kirkuk province lies at the centre of a tract of territory which Kurdish leaders want to incorporate in their autonomous region in the north despite the opposition of many of the province’s Arab and Turkmen residents, and of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

Violence in Iraq has fallen sharply from a peak of 2006 and 2007, but attacks still continue across the country.

In March 112 Iraqis were killed in violence.

Meanwhile, Iraq has accepted a request from Libya to provide assistance in disposing of Tripoli’s chemical weapons, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al Dabbagh said in a statement released on Thursday.

The Iraqi cabinet has agreed “to provide necessary technical assistance to the Libyan authorities to dispose of their chemical stockpiles, according to the procedures followed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),” the statement said.

Libya’s representative to the OPCW, Mohammed Jibril, requested Iraqi “help in the diplomatic and technical field to get rid of chemical stockpiles that Libya has which must be destroyed under the supervision” of the OPCW, it said.

Iraq approved the request because Baghdad wants “to provide the necessary assistance ... to Arab brothers at all levels,” the statement said, noting Iraq’s “extensive experience ... in disposing of chemical weapons.” The OPCW is the implementing body of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Iraq became the 186th state party in 2009, according to the OPCW website.

The OPCW said in November that Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council had pledged to continue with the previous regime’s programme of destroying its chemical weapons stockpiles.

The organisation said in January after a visit by inspectors that ousted Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi’s regime possessed undeclared mustard gas shells.

“Libya must now submit a detailed plan and completion date for destroying all of the declared materials to the OPCW not later than 29 April 2012, the date of the final extended deadline,” it said.

Iraq has long history with chemical weapons, which the regime of now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein used against Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq war, and also against its own civilian population.

In 1988, an estimated 5,000 people were killed in the Iraqi village of Halabja in what is now thought to have been the worst gas attack ever carried out against civilians.