Baghdad - The Iraqi military said on Wednesday said that Iraqi security forces had defused five explosive devices and had detained 31 people in Baghdad over the past 24 hours on suspicion of planning insurgent attacks.

In a statement, Baghdad's operations command said the detainees included many of Iraqi security's most-wanted "outlaws and miserable remnants of defeated terrorist groups."

A series of deadly bomb attacks, many of them in and near Baghdad, have left at least 120 people dead in recent weeks. On Tuesday, insurgents killed at least nine people in a series of attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the latest in a near-daily string of attacks in that city.

Iraqi police say they have arrested more than 100 insurgents in Mosul since they began a push to pacify the city dubbed "Operation New Hope."

Even as the Iraqi government has sought to combat insurgents through police and military operations, it has also reportedly pursued negotiations with armed groups in an attempt to get them to lay down their weapons and join the political process.

According to a report published in Baghdad's al-Sabbah newspaper on Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government had persuaded four opposition parties, including armed groups, to join the "national reconciliation" process, and that it would dispatch envoys to Arab countries to try to persuade opposition figures there to return to Iraq. (dpa)