Car bombs have killed close to 200 people in Baghdad in the deadliest attacks in the city since US and Iraqi forces launched a security crackdown aimed at halting the country's slide into sectarian civil war.
One car bomb alone in the mainly Shia Sadriya neighbourhood killed 140 people and wounded 150.
The day's second deadliest car bomb attack killed 35 people near an Iraqi army checkpoint in the Shia district of Sadr City.
At least ten civilians were killed and 12 wounded, including women and children, when a car bomb exploded on a main road near a private hospital in the central Karrada district.
Seven other people, including four policemen, were killed in separate car bomb attacks elsewhere in the capital.
The apparently co-ordinated attacks - there were five within a short space of time - occurred hours after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Iraq would take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year.
Mr Maliki said in a speech for a ceremony marking the handover of southern Maysan province from British forces that three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region would follow next.
He is under growing pressure from Moqtada al-Sadr to set a timetable for the withdrawal of 146,000 US troops from Iraq.
The transfer of Maysan means four of the country's 18 provinces are now under Iraq's domestic security control.
On top of the attacks in the Iraqi capital, police found 18 bodies in the city of Baquba. The corpses showed bullet wounds and torture marks.
Another four bodies were found in the northern city of Kirkuk, which is about 65km north of Baghdad.
