At least eight people were killed in violence across Iraq on Friday, including three anti-Al-Qaeda militiamen, a week before the US military is due to end its combat mission in the country.
Iraqi forces also arrested five Al-Qaeda militants linked to a deadly attack on Wednesday, a day that saw 53 people killed in car bombings blamed on the Islamist insurgent group.
The three Sahwa (Awakening) militiamen were killed overnight in northern Iraq, in the latest revenge attack against the force credited with turning the tide against Al-Qaeda.
Police said another three militiamen were wounded in the midnight (2100 GMT Thursday) attack on a checkpoint in the centre of the mainly Sunni Arab town of Al-Sharqat, 290 kilometres (180 miles) north of Baghdad.
Recruited by the US military among Sunni Arab tribesmen and former insurgents, the Sahwa, also known as the Sons of Iraq, played a key role in curbing sectarian violence which claimed thousands of lives in 2006 and 2007.
Dozens of its fighters have been killed in acts of retaliation in recent months.
Six were killed on Thursday in an attack in the village of Shrwain in ethnically divided Diyala province just north of the capital, one of Al-Qaeda's remaining Iraqi strongholds.
When full control of the Sahwa passed from the US military to the Iraqi government in April last year, Baghdad promised to integrate 20 percent of its men into the police or army, and find civil service jobs for many others.
But 52,000 are still waiting for new employment.
Meanwhile three soldiers were also killed on Friday in a pre-dawn attack in the volatile northern province of Nineveh, when gunmen attacked a patrol near the town of Al-Baaj close to the Syrian border, police said.
A policeman was also killed and another wounded when a homemade bomb exploded in the central of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh, police said.
Elsewhere in northern Iraq a nine-year-old boy was killed by gunmen who also wounded three people when they opened fire indiscriminately in a residential neighbourhood of Yarmuk, a village west of Kirkuk, Sarhad Qader, a police brigadier general, said.
A Christian glazier who was abducted a week ago by someone posing as a prospective client was found dead, his head riddled with bullets, despite his family paying a 15,000-dollar ransom for his release, police said.
Luay Barham al-Malik's decomposed body was found in a field in Nimrud, south of Mosul, Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Omar al-Juburi said.
Also on Friday, Iraqi police arrested three suspected Al-Qaeda members who confessed to masterminding Wednesday's bombing in the city of Kut, southeast of Baghdad, police Lieutenant Colonel Aziz al-Imara said.
"They admitted being behind the suicide attack against a police station in Kut and said the bomber was Sudanese," he said. Twenty people were killed and 90 others wounded in that bombing.
Imara said the suspects admitted "they had liaised with the terrorists who carried out the other attacks against security forces elsewhere in Iraq on Wednesday."
The Kut bombing was among more than a dozen apparently coordinated car bombs targeting Iraqi police and other attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda which killed 53 people on Wednesday and wounded 300.
Five of Wednesday's victims died in Fallujah and Ramadi, west of Baghdad, and Fallujah police chief Faisal al-Issawi said two suspected Al-Qaeda operatives have been arrested in connection with these attacks.
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