Iraq's next parliament session postponed to Aug 12 - state TV

Iraq's newly elected parliament has postponed its next session until August 12, state television said on Monday.
 
Parliament met last Tuesday for the first time since its election in April and had planned to meet again this Tuesday.
 
The office of acting parliamentary speaker Mehdi al-Hafidh confirmed the session had been postponed but did not give further details.

He said parliament would soon issue a statement.

On another note, police and medical sources said that at least seven people including four policemen were killed in northern Baghdad  when a suicide bomber blew up a car packed with explosives at a checkpoint.
 
The sources said that 17 people were wounded at the checkpoint in the mainly Shi'ite Kadhmiya district.
 
The prime minister's military spokesman Qassim Atta was not immediately available for comment.
 
Also, a senior Iraqi general has been killed in battle, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said in a statement.       

Major General Negm Abdullah Ali, army commander of the sixth division which is responsible for part of the capital Baghdad "met martyrdom on the battlefield as he was fighting ... terrorists", the statement said, without giving further details.

This comes after a Kurdish security forces official said a 12-year-old girl has been killed and eight other civilians wounded in an Iraqi airstrike on a Kurdish-held town in Iraq's northern province of Salahuddin. 

Jabbar Yawar, secretary general of the Kurdish peshmerga fighters, told Reuters the strike occurred on Sunday when military planes and helicopters targeted "a group of civilian residential buildings in the heart" of the town of Tuz Khurmato.         

Iraqi government forces are battling Sunni Islamist insurgents led by an ultra-radical group called the Islamic State in the area.        

The Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad said it would "clarify" the details of the incident at a briefing on Monday.          

The insurgents' rapid seizure of large swathes of northern and western Iraq over the past month has stirred international alarm over the possible disintegration of Iraq.          

The Kurds, who run their own autonomous region in northern Iraq, have taken advantage of the chaos to expand their territory by as much as 40 percent, including the oilfields and city of Kirkuk, which they claim as their national capital.        

Tuz Khurmato, which lies 88 km (55 miles) south of Kirkuk, was also seized by the peshmerga last month after Iraq's army withdrew before the insurgents' offensive. The insurgents have since clashed with the peshmerga and Turkmen militia in the area around Tuz Khurmato.     

The overall security situation across Iraq remains very tense. On Sunday night, five people were killed and 16 wounded in a bomb blast at a cafe in the Washash district of northwestern Baghdad, police and medics said.