Bomb and mortar attacks in towns north of Baghdad have killed at least eleven people, according to reports.
Mortar shells barraged a Shia enclave north of Baghdad today killing at seven people.
An estimated 16 mortar shells fell on houses in the Sharqiya residential area in Khalis, 50 miles north of Baghdad, police said. They said 24 people were wounded in addition to the three killed.
Khalis is a mainly Shia area in the volatile Diyala province and is frequently targeted by suspected Sunni insurgents.
Farther north, storekeepers in Kirkuk swept broken glass and other debris from the bloodstained pavement hours after a series of bombs struck commercial areas in the disputed city, killing at least four people and wounding 38.
The attacks started last night when a bomb struck a mainly Turkomen open-air market in the Qoriyah district in the city center, killing two people and wounding 25, police Col. Burhan Tayeb Taha said.
Three more explosions struck the city within three hours, killing two people and wounding 13, Taha said.
Police said at least three women and five children were wounded, including 4-year-old Diyar Mohammed.
"I was there to buy a toy for him and he was injured when shrapnel hit his head," his mother Narmeen Salih said as she sat beside him in the hospital.
The apparently co-ordinated attacks came four days after a quadruple suicide truck bombing that killed hundreds of members of the minority religious Yazidi sect in northwestern Iraq.
Minority sects such as the Yazidis and Turkomen are especially vulnerable as militants seek new targets to avoid a US-Iraqi military crackdown on Baghdad and surrounding areas to stop violence among warring Sunni and Shiite factions.
The US commander overseeing the cleanup in the northwestern villages that were devastated by Tuesday's attack said al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters were taking aim at remote communities after being chased out of the larger cities such as Mosul and Tal Afar.
Authorities in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, said the main street had been closed to vehicles to prevent the threat of car bombs. But Maj. Gen. Jamal Tahir, the general-director of police in Kirkuk, said the explosives that struck Friday were apparently wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in the garbage, and he appealed to civilians to be alert and report anything suspicious.
"The terrorists are changing their tactics in carrying out their crimes, so police and civilians should be more aware and open-minded to ensure security," he said. "I will not say that we will put a policeman at each garbage site or any other place, but I want to say that civilians should cooperate with security personnel in preventing terrorists from committing their crimes."
The US military also has warned that militants will try to step up attacks this month in a bid to upstage a pivotal progress report on Iraq due to be delivered in September by the top commander Gen. David Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker.