The bodies of three men killed by insurgents were found on a street in the Iraqi city of Mosul, a day after US troops in the city discovered the bodies of nine Iraqi soldiers who had been shot in the head.
Those found today had also been shot in the head, and lay on the ground in a street in the industrial sector of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city.
Scraps of paper left on the bodies said they were peshmerga, or Kurdish militiamen. Many of the region's recruits to the Iraqi National Guard, Iraq's newly formed civil defence force, are peshmerga.
Mosul remains on edge after anti-American insurgents routed the police force there a week ago, and there have been several reports of captured members of the new US-backed security forces being killed.
A group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in a statement dated November 20th that it had killed members of the Iraqi National Guard at a base northwest of Mosul, but it was not clear whether the claim referred to the latest killings.
The statement warned Iraqi soldiers they were all considered legitimate targets.
Tensions between Arabs and their Kurdish neighbours from the northern mountains have risen in Mosul recently with the arrival of ethnically Kurdish National Guards to replace police who fled their posts during the rebel offensive this month.
Yesterday, another Sunni Muslim group, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, posted a video on its Web site showing a masked man shooting two others in the back of the head. It said it had killed two Kurds from the Kurdistan Democratic Party, allied with the government, who had been providing intelligence for US troops in Mosul.
Zarqawi's group had said it had publicly beheaded two officers from the National Guard in Mosul on Thursday. A headless body was recovered by US forces in the restive south of the city that day, where residents said they had heard of two National Guard officers being killed.
The US military has said nothing linked the body to the security forces. US soldiers last week also said they had found at least three headless and dismembered corpses near a police station in the northeast of the city, and believed they were policemen killed after rebels sacked the station.