A car bomb slaughtered 34 people near a revered Shiite shrine in Iraq's pilgrimage city of Karbala on Saturday, two months to the day after US-led troops launched a security crackdown in Baghdad.
Another 10 people were killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad while other attacks around the country killed 13 more people, pushing the death toll to 57 and undermining the Iraqi-US security offensive as it began a third month.
The latest carnage came just two days after a suicide bombing at parliament's cafe in Baghdad's heavily-guarded Green Zone stunned the world for its massive breach of security.
The Karbala bomb exploded in an area cluttered with market stalls around 200 metres (yards) from the Imam Hussein shrine, where hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims flock every March during the Ashura commemorations.
