Fearful Iraqis spent sleepless nights guarding their homes and asking who would be next after gunmen burned mosques and houses in a Sunni enclave following the worst bomb attack since the US invasion.
The city of 7 million was under a tight curfew for a second full day since Thursday's bombing in which more than 200 Shias died.
The government called for calm, desperate to avert the sort of sharp escalation in violence that followed an attack on a Shia shrine in Samarra in February.
This time, many fear, such revenge attacks could push Iraq over the edge.
"Everybody is tense, everybody is expecting something may happen at any moment," said Abu Marwah (40) a Sunni Arab translator who spent much of the night on the roof of his house with his Kalashnikov at hand, keeping watch for militia attacks.
Exploding mortar bombs kept other Baghdad residents awake. The president, prime minister and leaders from all sides were due to meet again later in the day to discuss security.
Four mosques and some houses were burnt in the small Sunni part of the mainly Shia Hurriya area in northwest Baghdad, Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Salem al-Zobaie said on Friday.
Some 32 people were killed, police said, in attacks on the area by suspected Shia militiamen, untroubled by a curfew enforced after 202 died in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City.
A witness to yesterday's attacks in Hurriya, university teacher Imad al-Din al-Hashemi, said three women, three children and two men were badly burned but survived when gunmen threw petrol into their homes and set fire to the buildings.
Clashes and air strikes were reported by witnesses and a police source in Baquba, a tense religiously mixed city north of Baghdad. They said militants swept through the city and attacked a police centre, though no casualties were reported.
In a village in the same province, Diyala, a security source said the bodies of 21 Shias, including women and children from an extended family, were found executed in their homes.
Elsewhere
the US military said it killed 22 insurgents in two separate clashes on Saturday just north of Baghdad, shortly after carrying out three air strikes that destroyed a bomb-making factory.
In one incident, the US military said in a statement that they killed 12 insurgents including a militant suspected of rigging cars with explosives along a road north of Baghdad.
The US military said earlier they killed 10 insurgents after destroying a bomb-making factory in the town of Taji, a mostly Sunni town near a major US air base, in air strikes.
The White House called the violence since Thursday a "brazen effort to topple a democratically elected government". US President George W. Bush, under pressure on Iraq after his Republicans were trounced at midterm elections this month, is due to meet Iraqi Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan on Wednesday at what is shaping up to be a crisis summit.
But Mr Maliki, beholden in parliament to radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, finds himself in a dilemma.
Aides to Sadr, whose Mehdi Army has its powerbase in Sadr City where Thursday's carnage enflamed anger at the US forces, have threatened to quit the government if he meets Mr Bush.
Mr Bush aides indicated the meeting was still on. Mr Maliki and Mr Bush are expected to discuss how to give Iraqi forces more control, faster, to speed the prospect of America's 140,000 troops going home.
But Iraq's police and army command little trust. Gunmen in uniform are blamed for a string of attacks.
US Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Saudi Arabia on Saturday for talks with King Abdullah on the Middle East.
He was met in Riyadh by Crown Prince Sultan, government ministers and leaders of the Saudi armed forces, before travelling to the US embassy in the Saudi capital and the monarch's palace for what a spokeswoman said would be "comprehensive" talks on regional issues.