[An Nahar] Gun and kabooms north of Storied Baghdad...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
killed three people, including a young girl, and left 10 others maimed on Sunday, security and medical officials said.
In the restive ethnically-mixed province of Diyala, a spate of shootings and kabooms killed two, among them the five-year-old child.
"Gunmen opened fire on a five-year-old girl in front of her home in Muqdadiyah," a police colonel said, speaking on condition of anonymity
... for fear of being murdered...
. "She died immediately."
Another shooting in town of Khales, also in Diyala, left a local butcher dead in front of his store, the colonel said.
Three separate bombings in scenic provincial capital Baquba and the town of Ghalbiyah, just west of Baquba, left 10 people maimed, including five anti-Qaeda beturbanned goons known as the Sahwa, the officer and another security official said.
Doctors at Baquba Hospital put the toll from Sunday's violence in Diyala at two dead, including the young girl, and 10 maimed.
Much of the province was made of strongholds of Sunni bad turbans, and in particular al-Qaeda's front group in Iraq, during the country's bloody sectarian war from 2006 to 2008 and, while violence is dramatically lower than that point, attacks remain common.
In the northern oil-rich province of Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
meanwhile, police captain Shaaker Mahmoud was killed by a magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to his car in the town of Riyadh, according to police Brigadier General Sarhad Qader.
The latest violence comes after the country suffered a spike in unrest in June -- at least 282 people were killed last month, according to an Agence La Belle France Presse tally, though government figures said 131 Iraqis died.