Young girl among three dead in Iraq attacks

BAGHDAD - Agence France-Presse

REUTERS Photo

Gun and bomb attacks north of Baghdad killed three people, including a young girl, and left 10 others wounded today, security and medical officials said.
 
In the restive ethnically-mixed province of Diyala, a spate of shootings and explosions 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. "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 provincial capital Baquba and the town of Ghalbiyah, just west of Baquba, left 10 people wounded, including five anti-Qaeda militiamen 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 wounded.
 
Much of the province was made of strongholds of Sunni insurgents, 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, meanwhile, police captain Shaaker Mahmud 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 AFP tally, though government figures said 131 Iraqis died.