BAGHDAD: At least 43 people were killed in bomb attacks across Iraq yesterday, with nine explosions in busy markets and commercial areas of the capital Baghdad, police and medics said.

The deadliest attack was in the mainly Shiite Muslim Shaab district of northern Baghdad, where twin car bombs killed eight people.

A sustained campaign of attacks since the start of the year has increased fears of wider conflict in a country where ethnic Kurds, Shiite and Sunni Muslims have yet to find a stable power-sharing compromise.

Insurgents have been recruiting from Iraq’s Sunni minority, which resents Shiite domination since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Sectarian tensions have been inflamed by the civil war in neighboring Syria, which is fast spreading into a region-wide proxy war, drawing in Shiite and Sunni fighters from Iraq and elsewhere to fight on opposite sides of the conflict.