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A daily summary of global reports on security issues

A rash of car bombs killed dozens across Baghdad on Monday, the latest in a series of deadly bombings that have racked Iraq over the past several days. The violence has brought the country's civilian death toll to its worst level since 2008.

Al Jazeera reports that nine car bombs killed at least 24 people and wounded scores more, largely in the Iraqi capital's Shiite neighborhoods.

Media reports put the casualty figures at a minimum of 24 dead and 75 wounded to at least 40 killed and more than 170 injured.

Monday's bombings follow several attacks over the weekend in Baghdad. On Sunday, a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in the city of Musayyib, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, left 47 dead. And the Kurdish city of Erbil, which had largely been devoid of the violence affecting the rest of the country, saw a series of bombings on Sunday that killed six security officers, according to Kurd news outlet Rudaw.

Although no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Baghdad, BBC News reports that "Sunni Muslim insurgents have been blamed for much of the most recent violence."

Similarly, Sunday's attacks in Erbil went unclaimed by any particular group, but The New York Times reports that "much of the speculation surrounding the motivation for the attack centered on Syria, where Kurdish militias, some of them supported and trained by the security forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, have been fighting against jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda."

The Times adds that the Erbil attacks were remarkable less for their relatively low casualties than for the location, which had been "a haven of relative security and prosperity compared with the rest of the country." Not a single US soldier was killed in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Iraq war, according to the Times.

But the rise in violence, both in Erbil and across the rest of Baghdad, is threatening to match levels not seen since the heyday of the Iraqi insurgency in the late 2000s. The BBC reports that the death toll in recent months puts the number of people killed in Iraq this year at between 4,000 and 5,000 people. According to UN figures, there have been 4,137 civilians deaths in 2013 – by far the worst tally since 2008, when the death toll numbered 6,787.

º£½Ç´óÉñ reported earlier this month that many Iraqis feel the civil war never really ended, and that the recent surge in violence is evidence of the sectarian divide still plaguing the country – as well as the government's inability to unite Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites.