Fear generated by near-daily violence has kept residents of Iraq's second-largest city Mosul at home this Eid rather than out celebrating the main Muslim holiday of the year.

Nineveh province and its capital Mosul are among the most dangerous parts of Iraq, with militants carrying out frequent bombings and shootings and also allegedly extorting money from shop owners.

Suicide bombers killed 19 people in two attacks in northern Iraq on Thursday, while two more people died in other violence, officials said.

One suicide bomber detonated a vehicle rigged with explosives in a residential area of Al-Muwaffaqiyah, a village east of Mosul that is mainly populated by members of the Shabak minority.

A bomb exploded near an ambulance taking a pregnant woman to hospital in Iraq on Monday, wounding her and killing two people, police and a doctor said.

The blast near the northern city of Mosul also wounded the ambulance driver and killed a medic and a relative travelling with the pregnant woman, who was in labor at the time of the blast, the sources said.

Attacks in Baghdad and northern Iraq on Sunday killed seven people, including four policemen, and wounded 16 others, officials said.

Near the main northern city of Mosul, a car bomb exploded as security forces searched a home, killing three policemen and wounding 15 people, police and medical sources said.

Separate shootings in Iraq's main northern city of Mosul on Saturday left three people dead, including a local councilman, security and medical officials said.

In one attack, gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint in Mosul, 350 kilometers from Baghdad, killing a policeman and a civilian, said police First Lieutenant Mohammed al-Juburi and Dr. Mahmoud Haddad at Mosul General Hospital.

Bombings and a shooting against Iraqi security forces, a Shiite mosque and a local official killed six people and wounded dozens of others on Friday, security and medical officials said.

"Three policemen were killed and two others wounded by a bomb targeting their patrol in al-Muqdadiyah this morning," said a police lieutenant colonel in the town, which lies in restive Diyala province.

Iraq detained 22 policemen on Saturday after 19 inmates, including two men on death row, escaped from a prison in the northern city of Kirkuk a day earlier, the local police chief said.

"We are investigating 22 policemen who have been detained, to find out about the escape of the terrorists," Kirkuk provincial police chief Jamal Taher Bakr told AFP, adding that local police were hunting for those on the run.

Separate car bombs against displaced members of a tiny Kurdish sect and industrial workers left 12 people dead in Iraq on Monday, the latest in a spate of violence since U.S. troops left last month.

The attacks, hot on the heels of the storming of a police compound in west Iraq and a suicide attack on Shiite pilgrims in the south, come with the country locked in a festering political row pitting the Shiite-led government against the main Sunni-backed bloc.