Bombers killed 65 people, many of them young female students, at a Baghdad university today on one of the city's bloodiest days in weeks, and hours after it was announced that more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians died in violence last year.
At least 100 were killed in bombings and a shooting in the capital today, plus four US soldiers who died in a bomb attack in northern Iraq.
The Shia prime minister blamed the latest bloodshed in Baghdad on followers of Saddam Hussein. His fellow Sunni Arabs are angry at yesterday's botched execution of two aides, two weeks after the ousted leader was himself hanged amid sectarian taunts from official observers, captured on an illicit video.
A car bomb tore through students gathered outside the Mustansiriya University in central Baghdad, most of them women waiting for vehicles to take them home. A suicide bomber then walked into the panicked crowd at a rear entrance, killing more.
"The followers of the ousted regime have been dealt a blow and their dreams buried forever," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said in a statement. "So Saddamists and terrorists now target the world of knowledge and committed this act today against the innocent students of Mustansiriya University."
He vowed to catch the killers and see justice done.
The Education Ministry, whose employees and students have been frequent targets of what the United Nations report called Islamic extremists, issued a public appeal for blood for the 110 wounded and said the university would close until next week.
Rescue workers picked through smouldering wreckage and human remains as police pick-up trucks bore away casualties.
Earlier today the United Nations, in its latest two-monthly human rights report on Iraq, said data from hospitals and morgues put the total civilian death toll for 2006 at 34,452, or 94 per day.
Comparable figures for previous years were not available but officials agree sectarian bloodshed has surged in the past year.
"Without significant progress on the rule of law, sectarian violence will continue indefinitely and eventually spiral out of control," the UN human rights chief in Iraq, Gianni Magazzeni, told a news conference, chiding Iraqi leaders for not stopping militia killers operating with and within their security forces.
Mr Maliki's government, which branded the last UN report grossly exaggerated, banned its officials from giving casualty statistics and the United States, which has run Iraq for four years, declined to vouch for the UN data.
"Unfortunately it is a war," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "The actual number, whatever it is, is too high."
Mr Maliki and US President George W. Bush are preparing a security crackdown in Baghdad, involving Iraqi and some 20,000 American reinforcements, which is widely portrayed as a last chance to save Iraq from a civil war between Sunnis and Shias that could draw in Iran and Arab states on opposing sides.