Most of the attacks, which were carried out with car bombs and small arms, appeared to target security forces in the capital and other cities, authorities said. At least 55 people were killed and more than 220 wounded, according to local security officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The victims included several civilians, including some schoolchildren, security officials said.
Iraqi officials did not provide an official death toll, and few appeared on television to speak about, or condemn, the attacks. Osama al-Nujaifi, the speaker of parliament, issued a statement saying the attacks represented an attempt to “flare up strife” among Iraqis.
Nujaifi said the assailants might have been trying to ignite fears about security to dissuade regional officials from attending the annual Arab summit scheduled to be held in Baghdad next month.
Lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill approving the purchase of 350 armored vehicles for their personal use, worth more than $50 million. As the casualties mounted, Iraqis reacted with outrage and blamed the country’s fractured political leadership for the insecurity that continues to plague the country.
“Today’s events mean that we have no government or that we have a weak one,” Waleed al-Rubaie, a 34-year-old private sector worker, said. “The political disputes are behind today’s blasts.”
Tension among Iraqi politicians has soared since U.S. troops left, most notably after the issuance of an arrest warrant for the country’s Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi. Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused him of being involved in terrorist acts, a charge Hashimi has denied. The vice president has avoided arrest by staying in the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north.
Wesam al-Auqali, 35, a blacksmith, said the country’s security forces remain unprepared and susceptible to bribes. Auqali said he recently drove a big truck loaded with construction materials into a neighborhood where such vehicles are banned because of the threat of car bombs. All it took was a $4 payoff to a police officer, he said.
“You can imagine how easy it is to get a car bomb past,” he said. “They can get as many as they want through a checkpoint.”
Thursday’s carnage followed a relatively quiet period in Baghdad and other normally violent cities, a lull that had led some Iraqis to speculate that Sunni insurgents had flooded into neighboring Syria to join the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.
Although no group took responsibility for the bombings, they bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which in the past has carried out coordinated, complex attacks.
Baghdad bore the brunt of the latest attacks, with at least 23 dead, but assailants also struck in the northern provinces of Salahuddin and Kirkuk, in Anbar province in the west and in Babil province, south of Baghdad.
In the Adhamiyah district of northern Baghdad, assailants raised the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq, the umbrella organization that includes the local al-Qaeda group, according to security officials.
Londoño reported from Irbil, Iraq. Special correspondent Aziz Alwan in Irbil contributed to this report.
