Baghdad – Iraq is a much safer country than three years ago, the country’s national security minister said Sunday, despite a wave of bomb and gun attacks this week.

“Iraq is now 90-per-cent secure,” Sherwan al-Waeli, Iraq’s minister of national security, told the German Press Agency dpa.

His comments came after a spate of bombings in Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk left 74 people dead over the course of Wednesday night and Thursday.

Shortly after al-Waeli spoke to dpa on Sunday, gunmen shot a militiaman from a “Sahwa” or “Awakening” Sunni militia aligned with the government at a checkpoint in Hilla, roughly 100 kilometres south of Baghdad, police said.

Al-Waeli said that the attacks were isolated incidents, and did not compare to the kind of violence Iraq saw in the year 2006, when some 13,000 people were killed in sectarian attacks.

“But,” he acknowledged, “The latest wave of bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere made us reconsider our calculations, re-assess the distribution of our security units, their performance, and the reasons for any shortcomings.”

April was the bloodiest month this year in Iraq. More than 300 people, mostly Shiite Muslims in the capital, were killed in a series of deadly bomb blasts over the course of the month.

Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman Abdel-Karim Khalaf told dpa on Sunday that Iraqi security forces had arrested “all the perpetrators” of the April bombings, “in an extraordinary and exceptional effort that would send a clear message to all criminals who are thinking of sabotaging the country’s security.”

Khalaf said that despite some “unsystematic” attacks in various places in Iraq, the crime rate in the country had dropped back to normal.

Yassin Majid, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, told dpa he thought the latest wave of attacks had come in response to Iraqi police officials’ claim to have arrested Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the purported leader of the Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella insurgent group that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq.

“We might witness an increase in terrorist attacks following the detention and news about his confessions,” Majid said. “This is a reaction. His group is trying to save face, to prove that they are still capable of operating.”

“But these attacks are totally insignificant in the longterm,” he insisted. (dpa)