'Police forces have a clear control over the city. We have to admit that such attacks are funded by countries that seek to destabilize the security and political scene in Iraq,' he said.

Some 400 km to the south, at least 25 people were killed and 149 injured in separate attacks throughout Baghdad.

The deadliest of these blasts was when two car bombs exploded in two Shia areas in southwest Baghdad, where daily labourers gather each morning, leaving 23 killed and around 130 wounded.

That attack was followed by a blast near the northern city of Kirkuk, the subject of a simmering dispute between the central government in Baghdad and the government of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Two members of a Sunni Muslim, government-allied militia were killed by a roadside bomb, police in Kirkuk said. Five others were rushed to hospital for treatment.

Sectarian violence between the country's Sunnis and Shias has increased sharply in recent weeks, with a wave of bomb attacks near Mosul and in Baghdad and western Iraq claiming dozens of lives.

Mosul and its environs, one of the country's most ethnically and religiously diverse areas, remain the site of near-daily, deadly attacks despite successive security sweeps that police say have netted hundreds of suspected insurgents this year.