A car bomb on a busy commercial street in the Iraqi capital Baghdad has killed at least 11 people and wounded dozens more.
The bloody start to the month comes as the United Nations mission in Iraq reported Wednesday that 1,100 people were killed around the country in September, continuing what has been a particularly deadly year.
The toll from last month included 854 civilians and 265 members of the Iraqi Security Forces.
In the first nine months of 2014, nearly 12,000 people were killed, roughly the same number as the past two years combined.
A push by Sunni Islamist militants to take over large parts of northern and western Iraq has been a key source of the increased bloodshed, particularly in June when nearly 900 Iraqi military personnel were killed.
The government struggled to respond under former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. His critics blamed him for furthering sectarian tensions and failing to represent the interests of country's Sunnis, Kurds and other minorities.
Iraq's parliament named Haider al-Abadi to replace Mr. Maliki last month, just as the United States began a campaign of airstrikes to protects its interests in Iraq that later expanded to assisting Iraqi forces battling militants from the Islamic State group.
