A suicide bomber killed 36 people and wounded 40 at a Shi'ite funeral and gunmen ambushed a vital fuel convoy outside Baghdad amid a wave of attacks that made today Iraq's bloodiest day in weeks.
Car bombs also went off in the capital and in the recently peaceful Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala, suggesting a level of coordination that may be a response by Sunni Arab insurgents to last month's largely peaceful parliamentary election.
The funeral attack was the bloodiest single incident since the election. Some Sunni groups had declared an informal truce to encourage their community to vote and have been disappointed to see results handing continued domination to the Shi'ite Islamists and Kurds who have been in power for the past year.
The attack took place in Miqdadiya, 100 km (60 miles) northeast of the capital, where people were mourning a bodyguard to a local leader of the Dawa party, headed nationally by Shi'ite Islamist Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Assailants fired mortars on the mourners, forcing them to take cover in the cemetery. A bomber wearing an explosive vest then blew up among them, security officials said.
Soon afterwards, rebels armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns ambushed 60 fuel tankers on a road north of Baghdad, destroying 20 of them, police and oil officials said, saying the convoy's police escort was still fighting the attack.
There was no immediate word on casualties.
The convoy was part of a major government effort to ease fuel shortages in the capital following the recent closure of Iraq's main refinery at Baiji in the north; supplies were halted for 10 days because of threats to tanker drivers.
At least eight people were killed and 12 wounded when a car bomb exploded in southern Baghdad, police and hospital sources said. The car was parked close to a busy commercial market in the Doura district, they said.
Earlier, three people were killed when a car bomb went off in the Shi'ite district of Kadhimiya in the north of the city. The bombers defied a major security operation launched, police said, to find the kidnapped sister of the interior minister.