Car bombs kill scores in Baghdad pet markets and across Iraqand beyond
An Iraqi police officer looks at people fishing by the Tigris river facing the Shahid (martyr) Monument, which commemorates Iraqi soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war, in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on February 7, 2013.
Car bomb explosions have killed scores of people in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq, including a Baghdad pet market.
The attacks, which reportedly wounded at least 70 people, continued a spate of violence amid a political crisis and worsening sectarian tensions, The New York Times wrote.
In the Shia district of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, 13 people were killed in twin car bomb blasts inside a bird market, Reuters reported citing police.
Twin car bomb explosions at a vegetable market in the Shia-dominated city of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed 13 others, the report said.
No group had claimed responsibility for the blasts.
Reuters cited growing tensions between Iraq's Sunni, Shia and ethnic Kurdish factions for the attacks.
Insurgents are carrying out at least one high-casualty attack a month since a major US withdrawal in December 2011.
Friday's bombings targeted markets on their most crowded days, part of the weekend in Iraq, and according to a report in the Dawn, took the death toll from a week of violence to more than 100.
Militants have targeted visitors to weekend markets in the past: CNN recalled an attack in February 2008 in which 100 people were killed by bomb attacks at two other pet markets in Baghdad.
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