Sixty-five people, including students and teachers, were killed Tuesday in the most devastating attack this year as a suicide bomber and a car bomb wreaked havoc outside a Baghdad university.
The massive bombing came just hours after the United Nations said that the raging violence in Iraq left at least 34,452 people dead last year, an average of 94 killings a day.
On Tuesday around 100 people were killed, mostly in Baghdad, but the day's deadliest attack and the biggest since the start of 2007 came from the twin blasts at the entrance of the renowned Mustansiriyah University in east Baghdad, security officials said.
The explosions ripped through dozens of students, teachers and employees of the university as they were heading home at the end of the day, killing 65 and wounding 138. The blasts left a number of nearby cars completely burnt and many bodies charred in parked vehicles, an AFP photographer at the site said.
The dead and wounded were rushed to city hospitals in bed sheets, blankets, stretchers and a number of pick-up trucks. Burnt corpses lay on the street, their mobile telephones ringing unanswered, the photographer said.
Founded in the 13th century, Mustansiriyah University was attended by deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti whose execution on Monday for crimes against humanity heightened sectarian tensions.
Just minutes before the university bombing, a group of gunmen driving two motorcycles and a car sprayed shoppers in Baghdad's Al-Bounk neighbourhood, killing 10 people. The latest attacks came a few hours after the United Nations released a grim report on last year's casualties across Iraq.
Pointing to raging sectarian violence that has rocked Baghdad as the main cause of civilian deaths, the United Nations said in a report that at least 34,452 Iraqis died and another 36,685 were wounded in 2006 around the country.
"The situation is particularly grave in Baghdad, where most casualties and unidentified bodies that are daily recorded also bear signs of torture," the report said. The murders reached a peak in October, when 3,709 people were killed - the highest since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The Iraqi government has in the past disputed the UN's figures, calling them "exaggerated". "The root causes of the sectarian violence lie in revenge killings and lack of accountability for past crimes as well as in the growing sense of impunity for ongoing human rights violations," the UN said.
Members of security forces, it said, remained prime targets along with women, children and teachers. Quoting figures given by the interior minister Jawad al-Bolani, the UN said an average of 10 police officers had been killed daily since 2003 - the year US invaded Iraq.
The report also said that "at least 470,094 people have been forcibly internally displaced since the bombing in Samarra on 22 February 2006" of a Shiite mosque that also sparked an upsurge in sectarian murders.
The White House acknowledged that Iraqi civilians were paying a terrible toll. "It's 100-percent obvious that the civilian casualty numbers are way too high," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.
Snow said the death toll reflected "deliberate activity on the part of terrorists to try to use civilian deaths as a way not merely to push the United States out but to allow them to gain traction within Iraq." British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the civilians "tragic".
"Of course it's tragic when there's innocent civilians losing their lives in Iraq," he said at a regular monthly news conference. But he said: "Hundreds of thousands of them lost their lives, innocent people, under Saddam."
Baghdad has emerged as the epicentre of sectarian conflict pitting Iraqi Shiites against Sunni Muslims since the Samarra bombing. Dozens of corpses are found daily on the capital's streets of men killed execution-style by armed gangs of the two communities. To curb the deadly violence in Baghdad US President George W. Bush last week unveiled a plan which involved dispatching 21,500 more troops to Iraq.
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