The bombings were the latest in a surge of attacks in Iraq this summer — before, during and after Ramadan — that have brought monthly death tolls to levels not seen in nearly five years, according to United Nations figures.

The attacks on Saturday killed at least 61 people and injured more than 200 across Iraq, an Interior Ministry official said.

Nine car bombs struck around Baghdad, the capital, at public markets and near a city park, and many exploded in Shiite neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of the increasingly violent Sunni insurgency led by Al Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate, killing at least 35 people. Other attacks — in the northern city of Tuz Khurmato, in Hilla, Karbala and Dhi Qar in the south and in Babil, in central Iraq — killed at least 26.

According to the United Nations, 1,057 Iraqis were killed and 2,326 were wounded in attacks in July, the highest monthly casualty figures since 2008.

“We haven’t seen such numbers in more than five years, when the blind rage of the sectarian strife that inflicted such deep wounds on this country was finally abating,” Gyorgy Busztin, the acting United Nations representative for Iraq, said recently. 

Source:The New York Times