BAGHDAD – Car bomb attacks killed at least 34 people in Baghdad on Thursday, Aug. 15

Baghdad- More than 100 people were wounded in at least eight blasts, one of which was near the “Green Zone” diplomatic complex, part of a wave of bloodshed that has taken the monthly death toll in Iraq to the highest levels in five years.

“Iraq’s streets have become a battleground for sectarian people who are motivated by hatred and religious edicts and daring to kill innocent people,” the Interior Ministry said in an unusually frank statement.

“It is our destiny to win this battle which is aimed at destroying the country and turning it into another Syria,” the ministry said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Iraq risked destabilization from Sunni and Shi’a extremists as civil war flares in neighboring Syria.  Meeting Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Kerry said that Iraq faced “increasingly turbulent, violent and unpredictable” regional currents.

“Sunni and Shia extremists on both sides of the sectarian divide throughout the region have an ability to be able to threaten Iraq’s stability if they’re not checked,” Kerry told reporters.

Zebari, in Washington told Kerry that the Iraqi people would not succumb to the violence and the government would not allow a lapse into civil or sectarian war.

“There is a clear determination by the Iraqi leadership that really we’ve been there before, in 2007-2008. We are not going to go there again,” Zebari said at the State Department.

Kerry said the United States would help Baghdad deal with the spillover from the Syrian conflict, including weapons flowing out of Syria into Iraq and from Iraq to Syria, as well as to combat the efforts by al-Qaeda and by Syrian regime to recruit Iraqis.