Six car bombs killed at least 19 people across Baghdad on Thursday as Iraq’s prime minister urged the United States to give Iraqi forces more weapons and said he could bring security in three to six months if they did. Three bombs in quick succession killed at least 10 people and wounded 30 in a wholesale vegetable market in the violent southern district of Dora, police said.

A car bomb and a suicide bomber killed 60 people and wounded 110 more, including many students who were blown up as they waited for cars to take them home at the entrance to a university in Baghdad, police said. ”The majority of those killed are female students who were on their way home,” an official at the historic al-Mustansiriya University’s media office said.

Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday for crimes against humanity, a dramatic, violent end for a leader who ruled Iraq by fear for three decades before he was toppled by a United States invasion in 2003. In what looked like a swift response by Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam, a car bomb killed 34 people in a Shi’ite town — the sort of sectarian attack that has pitched Iraq toward civil war since US troops broke Saddam’s iron grip.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki distanced himself on Wednesday from a United States-announced ”timeline” to end sectarian violence and criticised a raid on a Shi’ite militia stronghold aimed at a death squad leader. Al-Maliki, himself a Shi’ite Muslim, spoke a day after the top US civilian and military officials in Iraq said his government had agreed to a series of steps to end the bloodshed.