Baghdad: Attacks mainly targeting Shiite-majority areas of Iraq killed at least 57 people Tuesday, and security forces killed 10 militants, officials said, as the interior ministry warned of civil war.
Iraq is witnessing its worst violence since 2008, when the country was emerging from a bloody sectarian conflict.
More than 800 people have now been killed this month, and over 3,000 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.
The violence has included sophisticated, highly coordinated attacks, such as assaults on two prisons that saw more than 500 inmates, including senior Al-Qaeda members, escape.
Today, 11 car bombs hit nine different areas of Baghdad, seven of them Shiite-majority, while another exploded in Mahmudiyah south of the capital.
Two more car bombs exploded in Kut, while two hit Samawa and another detonated in Basra, all south of Baghdad.
Bombings elsewhere in Iraq killed six police, among them a lieutenant colonel and a captain, in addition to a soldier and two civilians.
The interior ministry warned of the consequences of the bloodshed.
Iraq is faced with "open war waged by the forces of bloody sectarianism aiming to plunge the country into chaos and reproduce civil war", the ministry said in a statement.
Iraq was racked by a bloody Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict that peaked in 2006-2007, when thousands of people were killed because of their religious affiliation or forced to abandon their homes under threat of death.
AFP
