Four female suicide bombers killed at least 61 people and wounded another 238 in Iraq on Monday, in three attacks on Shi'ite pilgrims marching in Baghdad and in another attack on a Kurdish demonstration in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk.

According to police and medical authorities, 32 people were killed, in Baghdad, in addition to 102 wounded in the attacks of three women strapped with explosives who blew themselves up. The attack in Kirkuk, also caused by a woman suicide bomber, registered a number of 25 people killed and 178 wounded.

The violence in Kirkuk, a city having delicate ethnic and sectarian composition seating up on huge oil supplies, deeply agitated government and security officials, who set out curfews there and in Baghdad. Protection from United Nations security forces was requested by leaders of the Turkmen ethnic group, who are in rivalry for land and political power with the Kurds.

Worries about the so fragile state of stability went up so high that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki placed a battalion of Iraqi troops to reinforce Kirkuk and ordered other unspecified “emergency reserve” troops to be on alert in case the violence outstretched, reported state television late Monday.

The tension in the city was already on high scales when thousands of Kurds streamed into a sector near the provincial headquarters on Monday morning, to protest against legislation in Baghdad that would weaken the dominance of the Kurds in the Iraqi capital.

Then, right after 11 a.m., a suicide bomber blew herself up, killing at least 17 demonstrators and inflicting wounds on 47 others, according to the native security officials. The terrorist act was not claimed. Still, many Kurds in the mob pointed out to Turkmen extremists and immediately responded by ravaging Turkmen political offices and setting their buildings on fire.

According to the Kirkuk police, gunfire and rocks thrown by the mob injured at least 25 Turkmen guards. Armed with machine guns, the guards responded and killed at least 12 Kurds in the crowd. Moreover, 102 people were wounded in the melee following the bombing though accurate numbers of how many were shot by Turkmen guards or wounded by other violence were not known.

By the night’s fall, the uprising and clash by Kurds against Turkmens had become one of the cruelest ethnic conflicts in Kirkuk since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The attacks in Baghdad started just before 8 a.m. when two women used suicide vests and a third a bomb in a bag to discharge blows just minutes apart, killing 32 people, all seemingly Shiite pilgrims marching in a festival. Among the dead were at least four children, of which one an infant. At least 64 people were injured.