String of bomb blasts kill scores in Iraq

Bombs exploded across the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 37 people, police said.

Five of the six blasts were in mainly Shi'ite Muslim districts, but there was also an explosion in the predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Doura.

The attacks are the latest in a wave of violence that has seen the deadliest months in Iraq since 2008. The mounting death toll has raised fears that the country is falling back into the spiral of violence that brought it to the edge of civil war in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

In the deadliest attack, a parked car bomb blew up in a commercial street in Husseiniya, killing five people, police said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks.

Sunni Islamist insurgents including Al-Qaeda have been regaining momentum this year in a campaign to destabilize Iraq's Shiite-led government and foment intercommunal conflict.

Sunday, suicide attackers blew up explosives-laden vehicles next to an elementary school and a police station in a small northern Iraqi village on Sunday, killing at least 15 people, including many children, officials said.

On Saturday, at least 75 people were killed in blasts and shootings across Baghdad and the city of Tikrit.

More than 6,000 people have been killed across the country this year, according to monitoring group Iraq Body Count, reversing a decline in sectarian bloodshed that had reached a climax in 2006-07.

United Nations figures released this week showed that at least 979 people, most of them civilians, were killed last month alone.

Al Jazeera and Reuters