KIRKUK, Iraq – At least 71 people were killed in Iraq yesterday when four suicide bombers struck in an attempt to disrupt the fledgling nation’s security services.

The latest attacks were part of an escalating campaign of guerrilla violence that has killed nearly 400 Iraqis since a newly elected government was unveiled two weeks ago.

According to an American military spokesman, attacks by insurgents have risen to an average of 70 a day this month from about 30 to 40 a day in February and March.

The explosions in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, and the northern town of Hawijah demonstrated the insurgents’ ability to strike over a wide area within a short timeframe.

It was not clear, however, to what degree the attacks were coordinated.

In Hawijah, a suicide bomber walked up to an army recruitment center and detonated an explosive belt at 9:30 a.m. as about 150 applicants were lining up.

At least 32 people were killed and 34 injured. Attempts to cripple the formation of Iraq’s new security services are now a near-daily occurrence. The general hospital in Kirkuk, the strategic oil-rich city, is the nearest medical center to Hawijah.

Doctors waiting for the worst of the maimed victims to arrive knew that some would be beyond their ability to save, as is often the case in hospitals across Iraq.

“We have no resuscitation devices, no intravenous fluid, no ventilators,” said Dr. Abdullah Yussef. “We do not have enough equipment.”

The first patients to be rolled in from the ambulances, which are little more than transit vans equipped with a first-aid kit and extra rolls of bandages, left a trail of blood through the entrance hall.

On one, the skin of the face had been peeled back and hung in flaps. Blood oozed through bandages on the leg of another, his chest pepper-marked with almost perfectly round holes where stones had been lifted off the street and into his body. Another had his face cut and hip shattered, the area swelling from internal bleeding.

One of the injured, a 31-year-old called Hussein Ali, made his own way, despairing of the wait for medical teams and with a bandage made from his own shirt tied around his shoulder.

“There was screaming and guys suffering from the pain,” he said. “They had lost hands and legs. There were a lot of hands, and I saw a head separated from its body.

“Then the terrorists started shooting at us. There were four or five of them, and when the Iraqi police and army arrived, they started shooting in every direction.

“The medical people would not help as they were frightened there would be another bomb. I saw bodies you could not recognize, their faces torn to shreds.”

The American military base in Kirkuk sent some medical staff to help.

Captain James Schroeder treated an aspiring police officer whose leg had bulged with bleeding from the fracture in his hip.

“He died,” he said. “Too much blood loss by the time he had got here.”

In one of the hospital wards, two men lay in clothes saturated with congealing blood.

One had a breathing tube down his throat. A ventilation machine was being methodically held to the end to partly inflate his lungs, then moved away to let them deflate.

The hospital did not have the valve to enable it to be properly connected.

“They do their best,” Captain Schroeder said. “But you can see this place. The equipment is historic. It’s at least 20 years out of date, and they only have enough to run three of the six operating rooms at one time.”

In Tikrit, a suicide car bomb killed 33 and wounded another 80, the majority of them Shia workers going to a nearby police station.

The Iraqi militant group Army of Ansar al-Sunna claimed responsibility for the bombing in an Internet statement.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a police station in the southern suburb of Dora, killing at least three civilians.

A suicide car bomb attack on a police patrol in the Mansour district of the capital killed two policemen and a civilian, officials at the interior ministry said.