A suicide car bomb explosion targeting an Iraqi army checkpoint south of Baghdad Monday killed at least 10 people, security and medical sources said.

The blast in Yusufiya, a frequently targeted area just south of the capital, also left at least 17 people wounded, an interior ministry official said.

A medic at the nearby Mahmudiyah hospital said at least four soldiers were among those killed in the blast.

It came just hours after Iraqi forces launched an offensive to retake second city Mosul, in the north of the country, from the Islamic State group.

Observers had warned that IS might seek to attack civilians in Baghdad and elsewhere as Iraqi forces launch their bid to wrest back the jihadists' last major stronghold in the country.

IS has not yet claimed responsibility for the Yusufiya bombing but has perpetrated nearly all such attacks recently.

An attack on a funeral tent in Baghdad on Saturday killed at least 36 people. Another two people were killed in a blast in the capital on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia urges Iraq to keep Shia militias from Mosul
London (AFP) Oct 17, 2016 - Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Monday that Riyadh had urged the Iraqi government not to let Shia militias enter Mosul, fearing "mass atrocities".

As Iraqi forces launched an offensive aimed at retaking the country's second city from the Islamic State jihadist group, Jubeir warned against a repeat of the events in Fallujah, which IS was chased out of in June.

"We oppose any kind of involvement by the Shia militias," The Guardian newspaper reported Jubeir as saying at a press conference in London.

"When they went into Fallujah they committed mass atrocities, including a mass grave of 400 people."

He said extremist recruitment and website traffic surged by 150 percent following the Fallujah offensive.

"If they go into Mosul, which is many times larger than Fallujah, I would expect the negative reaction will be tremendous and if there are mass killings, it could end up being a bonanza for violent extremists, and recruitment.

"It could add fuel to the sectarian fires raging in the region and so we have urged the Iraqi government not to use the Shia militias. That is the greatest danger that we see.

"We actually told them to disband them, and yet they have not. They are being managed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They are brutal."

Iraqi forces advanced towards Mosul on Monday in an assault targeted at retaking Mosul and dealing a death blow to IS's "caliphate" in the city where it was declared two years ago.

Some 30,000 federal forces are leading the offensive, backed by air and ground support from a 60-nation US-led coalition, in what is expected to be a long and difficult assault on IS's last major Iraqi stronghold.

Jubeir backed the assault on Mosul, saying the Saudis supported "any objective which is to destroy al-Qaeda absolutely".

However, he did not suggest Riyadh should play any part in the reconstruction of the city.

If IS was beaten back from Mosul, its fighters would likely flee to territory it holds in Syria.

The start of the long-awaited assault raised deep concerns for hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in Iraq's second-largest city, with aid groups warning of a massive humanitarian crisis.