Ten protesters wounded in clashes with Kurdish security forces in violent rally in Iraq

Ten protesters were wounded on Saturday in clashes with Kurdish security forces in the latest violent rally in Iraq demanding that officials combat graft and improve basic services.

The rally, along with another in the same Kurdish city and others in Baghdad, came after two protests in as many days earlier this week left three people dead and more than 100 wounded.

"Ten people who were demonstrating were wounded in the head, the arm or the back," said Raykot Hama Rashid, the head of the provincial health department in Sulaimaniyah province, in the northern autonomous Kurdish region.

The confrontations broke out when protesters attempted, for the second time in three days, to storm an office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of regional president Massud Barzani, the dominant political bloc in the region.

On Thursday, demonstrators attempted a similar tactic, only for security forces to fire into the air, killing two people and leaving 54 others wounded.

More than 1,000 people had attended the protest, which began in the early afternoon at a main square in Sulaimaniyah, to call for the release of individuals arrested over Thursday's rally. They also called for the prosecution of the head of the city's KDP office who, they claimed, gave the order for security forces to open fire.

Earlier in the day, around 2,000 students at Sulaimaniyah University demonstrated on campus, demanding an apology from Barzani for Thursday's deaths.