Car bombs kill 32 in southern Iraq

Two car bombs killed at least 32 people and wounded 75 others in the centre of the southern Iraqi city of Samawa on Sunday, police said.

The first blast was near a local government building and the second one about 60 metres away at a bus station, police sources said.

DAESH terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Unverified online photographs showed a large plume of smoke rising above the buildings as well as burnt out cars and bodies on the ground at the site of one of the blasts, including several children. Police and firefighters carried victims on stretchers and in their arms.

DAESH holds positions mostly in Sunni areas of the country's north and west, far from the mainly Shiite southern provinces where Samawa is located. Such attacks are relatively rare.

Bombings in Samawa came a day after a suicide bomber, driving a car, killed at least 19 people and wounded 48 others on Saturday in an attack claimed by DAESH on a group of Shiite Muslim pilgrims in a southeastern suburb of Baghdad.

Iraq has been struggling with a deepening political crisis for months.

The quota-based governing system put in place by the United States after invasion of the country in 2003 is being challenged by hundreds of protesters who camped out overnight in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone after storming the parliament building.