HILLAH, Iraq - Two similar, horrifying scenes: Car bombings just hours apart hit bustling Shiite towns during peak shopping times, ripping through outdoor fruit and vegetable markets and leaving behind a landscape of burned bodies and bloody wreckage.
The attacks - just before weekly Muslim prayers Friday morning in Hillah and just before dinner-time Thursday evening in Balad - seemed staged to kill or maim as many civilians as possible.
And with a total death toll of at least 110, the carnage signaled that Sunni insurgents are intensifying their bloody campaign to scare Shiites away from voting in a crucial referendum on Iraq's new constitution.
''Where are the security men? Where are the policemen? What have the women and children done to be killed like this?'' cried a man in Hillah, where a car exploded at about 9:30 a.m. At least 10 people, including three women and two children, were killed and 41 wounded, said Dr. Mohammed Beirum of Hillah General Hospital.
In Balad, unidentified bodies in bags or under pieces of cardboard lay on the ground in a hospital courtyard Friday. Weeping women went from body to body searching for loved ones. The three, closely timed suicide blasts reduced nearly an entire block in the market district to a giant mound of twisted metal and bricks strewn with bananas, tomatoes and other produce. The death toll was at least 102.
Insurgents have vowed to derail the Oct. 15 referendum, opposed by Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.
The recent surge of violence has killed at least 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members, in the past five days.
Sunni-led al-Qaida in Iraq, the most feared insurgent group, has declared ''all-out war'' on Shiites, and since a Shiite-majority government took power April 28, suicide bombers have killed at least 1,345 people, according to an Associated Press count.
Intimidating Shiites from voting in the referendum could boost Sunni attempts to reject the charter, and the tactic was having an affect among some in Balad and surrounding Shiite towns.
Mohammed Kadhim, 25, a Shiite shopkeeper in the town of Dujail, said he would not allow his family to vote. ''I'm responsible for their safety after what happened in Balad, and what is happening in the whole country with the occupation forces and the government.''
Hussein Ali, a 67-year-old Shiite in Balad, also said he would stay away from the polls. ''I will not take part in this game that kills Iraqis,'' he said.
The sharpening Sunni-Shiite divide is a blow to hopes that the constitution would unite Iraqis and bring stability, allowing the U.S. military to begin pulling out troops. Withdrawals projected for next spring may have to be pushed back.
The constitution ''didn't come out as the national compact that we thought it was going to be,'' the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, told a Pentagon news conference Friday. ''And that caused the situation to change a little bit.'' He said he still believed some troop reductions were possible in 2006.
Iraqi and U.S. forces were gearing up for more mayhem, increasing the number of checkpoints around Baghdad. Iraqi security forces have intelligence that 33 car bombs are ready and located somewhere in the capital, said Maj. Abdul-Karim al-Mohammedawi, of Iraq's Interior Ministry.
Iraqi troops at a checkpoint Friday captured a woman strapped with explosives under her clothes who was headed for a flea market to carry out a suicide bombing, said army Gen. Jalil Khalaf.
