Bahrain's top envoy in Iraq was wounded Tuesday, as insurgents mounted attacks against foreign diplomats across Iraq.

Just three days after gunmen kidnapped Egypt's ambassador in Iraq, Bahraini diplomat Hassan Malallah al-Ansari was shot on his way to work in the Mansour district of western Baghdad.

In an interview with the official Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Yousef Mahmoud said the envoy was injured in a failed abduction attempt.

"There was an attempt to kidnap him by gunmen when he was on his way from his house to the Bahrain mission in Baghdad," Mahmoud said.

The Associated Press reports that al-Ansari was treated in hospital for a shoulder wound, and has since been released.

In a separate incident Tuesday, Pakistan's official envoy in Iraq, Mohammed Younis Khan, was headed home in the same neighbourhood when gunmen attacked his convoy.

"Our escort fired back at them so we were able to escape without any harm," Khan told AP. "It happened so quickly I didn't have time to think of being scared."

Pakistan Foreign Ministry officials have now asked Khan to return home temporarily.

Since he was pistol-whipped and shoved into the back of a car on Saturday, there has been no word on the condition of whereabouts of kidnapped Egyptian envoy Ihab al-Sherif.

Last month, the 51-year-old Egyptian diplomat became the first ambassador from an Arab country posted to Iraq since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

According to Iraq government spokesperson Laith Kuba, the spate of attacks on Arab and Muslim diplomats is meant to discourage Islamic countries from normalizing relations with its postwar, U.S.-backed government.

"The aim is clear, just to create a state of fear," Kuba told reporters on Tuesday, describing the weekend abduction as "an attempt to ... scare the other diplomatic missions so that they won't expand their presence in Iraq."

In other violence Tuesday:

• Four U.S. Marines were wounded in the town of Hit, in a pair of attacks by suicide car bombers.
• Four women were killed and three men injured when gunmen ambushed a minibus taking the Baghdad airport employees to work.
• A roadside bomb blast and firefight left two Iraqi soldiers dead and seven others wounded in the Abu Ghraib district outside Baghdad.
• A misguided mortar attack left a 13-year-old girl dead and four civilians injured in Samarra, north of the capital. And north of the Anbar provincial capital, Ramadi, two sisters died in another mortar attack.

The death toll from insurgent attacks has been pegged at more than 1,400 since Iraq's new government was announced in late April.