Baghdad was battered by a string of deadly mortar and bomb attacks on Wednesday that killed at least 10 people as Iraq's warring factions battled for control of a shattered country.
Two court officials were killed when a their jeep exploded as it crossed a bridge leading over the Tigris from a city centre district housing the defence and interior ministries and the main gate into the fortified Green Zone.
Attackers had attached a timed bomb to the fuel tank, security officials said. The explosion ripped the car apart just metres (yards) from the most secure buildings in Iraq in a very public display of the chaos gripping the capital.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, a car bomb and a mortar attack killed two police officers and six civilians, while relatives mourned the deaths of 25 wedding guests -- including 19 children -- in a bomb attack the night before.
Downriver of the capital in Suweira, where water is drawn from the Tigris to irrigate fields, the bodies of 10 murder victims, one of them beheaded, were washed up, mortuary manager Mamun Ajil said.
And in the main northern city of Mosul, six people were shot dead in separate incidents, police Major Ahmed Mohammed said.
The number of US servicemen and women killed in Iraq in October hit 104 with the announcement of the death of a soldier fighting in the west of the country, the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency against American forces.
"One soldier assigned to Regimental Combat Team 7 died due to injuries sustained from enemy action on Tuesday while operating in Al-Anbar province," a US military statement said.
Tuesday was the last day of a particularly bloody month for US soldiers, with 99 killed in action and five in accidents and non-combat related incidents -- making it the deadliest month for the US military since January 2005.
The death toll has had a chilling effect on the prospects of US President George W. Bush's Republican party in next week's US congressional elections.
A Wall Street JournalNBC poll showed 52 percent of voters plan to vote for opposition Democrats, while 54 percent of voters said the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein was not worth the cost in dollars and lives.
It was the highest percentage rejecting the war since it began, while 63 percent disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq, compared to 61 percent in June.
Responding to criticism of his strategy, Bush has vowed to work more closely with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government and speed up the training of Iraqi forces in order to start bringing the 150,000 US troops here home.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Iraqi security forces would be expanded past both their current level of 310,000 and the former target of 325,000, but did not say by how much.
Pentagon officials played down reports that General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, wants funding to recruit 100,000 more Iraqi soldiers, and said the figure might be closer to 32,500.
"Therefore now it is simply a matter of our pressing forward and getting our portion of the budget up to Congress and working to see that it is executed," Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington.
Casey said last month that it will take 12 to 18 months for the Iraqi security forces to assume responsibility for security throughout the country.
But Maliki has argued that if he had more direct day to day control over his troops -- most of whom are still under Casey's chain of command -- he could bring Iraq's sectarian war to an end within six months.