The head of Iraq's Governing Council said on Wednesday that the death toll from attacks on Shia shrines in Baghdad and Kerbala on Tuesday had risen to 271.
"The number of martyrs from the two cities as of this afternoon is 271," Governing Council President Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum told a news conference in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Shia leaders called for calm on Wednesday and urged their followers not to be provoked into civil war by a wave of bomb attacks that killed at least 227 worshippers as they marked their holiest day.
Huge crowds of mourners marched through Kerbala chanting "God is Greatest" and bearing flower-laden coffins aloft through streets packed with Shias.
Suicide bombers, mortars and concealed explosives, killed at least 115 people in Kerbala on Tuesday, while three suicide bombers killed at least 70 in Baghdad, according to the latest figures from Iraqi Health Minister Khudier Abbass.
The co-ordinated attacks, targeting Shias marking the holy period of Ashura with mass gatherings in Iraqi cities, made it the bloodiest day since Saddam Hussein was toppled.
Ayatollah Hadi al-Muddaresi, one of Iraq's foremost Shia clerics, said, "The bombings were an attempt by extremists to foment civil war in Iraq, where the 60 percent Shia majority were for decades suppressed under Saddam.
"There are parties and groups that are willing to push Iraq towards civil war, but I don't think it will happen because the first people who will lose will be those who are pushing for it," the cleric told Reuters in his offices in Kerbala.
"Even if the concept of civil war is hanging out there, the material to make it happen isn't there ... We as Shia refuse to be drawn into such a conflict," he said.
The Governing Council announced three days of mourning from Wednesday and postponed the signing of an interim constitution agreed earlier this week after days of wrangling. The document is a key step in Washington's plans to hand sovereignty back to Iraqis on June 30.
"There has been an agreement to postpone it, but the exact date has not been settled," a spokesman said. "The law's ready, it's only because of (the attacks) that it has been postponed."
Shias had to compromise on the constitution, but they hope their numbers will give them the strongest political clout in a democratic Iraq after decades of oppression.
The US-led administration was forced to speed up its timetable for elections after Iraq's leading Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded a vote by June 30.
The United Nations ruled this impossible and Sistani changed his deadline to the end of the year. In a statement on Tuesday, Sistani urged Iraqis not to let the day's bloodshed divide them.
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