Attacks across Iraq have killed 39 people while the head of Baghdad's provincial council has escaped an assassination attempt.
The violence is the latest in months of unrelenting bloodshed, the country's worst since 2008.
Authorities have imposed tough restrictions in the capital and elsewhere and carried out wide-ranging operations against militants, but insurgents have pressed attacks across the country.
On Sunday, they struck in more than a dozen towns and cities, with at least 14 car bombs, killing 39 people and wounding more than 100 overall.
The deadliest violence was in and around Hilla, the predominantly Shi'ite capital of Babil province south of Baghdad, where four car bombs killed 19 people, police and medics said.
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"I saw many people with burns, and people who were on fire, they were screaming for help," said Sajjad al-Amari, a 22-year-old witness to one of the attacks.
Another witness, Karrar Ahmed, told AFP he saw "many shop owners who were thrown to the floor, many were killed and wounded, and they were lying on the ground, among the goods from their shops".
Ahmed said incompetence by the security forces had "cleared the way for terrorists to target, and kill, civilians".
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the violence, which largely struck majority Shi'ite areas.
Sunni militants linked to al-Qaeda, however, often target Iraq's Shi'ite majority, whose adherents they regard as apostates.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, a car bomb hit the convoy of Riyadh al-Adhadh, chief of the provincial council and a Sunni lawmaker from the party of the national parliament speaker.
Adhadh was unharmed but two others, including one of his bodyguards, were killed and four people were wounded.
The blast shattered the windows of nearby shops and buildings, and security forces imposed a cordon in the aftermath.
Another car bombing at a market on the outskirts of the southern port city of Basra killed three people and wounded 15 others, officials said.
Several other attacks south of Baghdad - in Karbala, Nasiriyah, Kut, Suweirah and Hafriyah - left five dead, while shootings and bombings in and around the predominantly Sunni cities of Abu Ghraib, Baquba, Sharqat and Mosul killed 10 more.
The latest bloodshed comes amid a months-long increase in violence which has left more than 4000 dead already this year, as Iraq grapples with a prolonged political deadlock and spillover from the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
