Some 400 people have been killed in Iraq over the past three days, officials and medics said Friday.
A series of coordinated bombings of Shiite marketplaces in and north of the capital on Thursday killed some 125 people in Baghdad and the Shiite town of Khalis.
Two suicide bombers tore through the market in the capital on Thursday that medics said killed 82 men, women and children as they shopped before the evening curfew and in preparation for Friday.
Hours before the Baghdad bombings, a string of vehicle bombs, roadside bombs and mortar attacks killed another 43 people and wounded dozens in Khalis, said Ahmed al-Khadran, brother of the town's mayor, according to AFP. The four coordinated car bombings and mortar attacks there struck a market, courthouse and a new army base.
On Tuesday, doctors and army officers said 160 Iraqis were slaughtered in the northern town of Tal Afar, 85 in a suicide bombing targeting a Shiite crowd waiting for food rations and 75 Sunni men shot in a revenge killing spree.
Nearly 200 others were wounded in the bombing and 40 men remain missing after being dragged out of their homes at gunpoint in the shooting rampage.
Another 23 bodies were discovered in the nearby northern city of Mosul on Friday, including the corpses of three policemen, said local police Major Samir Khalaf. A security official said 25 bodies were found in Baghdad late Thursday.
Iraqi officials and the US military have reported another 53 Iraqis killed in random attacks and five Americans dead in the past three days.
On his part, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr issued a verbal attack on the United States on Friday, blaming Washington for Iraq's troubles and calling for a mass demonstration April 9.
Meanwhile, the US army declared on Friday the latest death of a soldier in a roadside bomb attack in the capital, bringing the American military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,243, according to the Pentagon.
