BAGHDAD: At least 24 demonstrators were killed in renewed rallies across Baghdad and Iraq`s south on Friday by live rounds and tear gas, according to a national rights watchdog.

The protests represent a second phase of a week-long movement in early October that ended with more than 150 people dead.

Rallies had been set to resume on Friday, with a range of actors from Iraq`s highest Shia authority to the United Nations urging restraint during the second phase.

They began that way and ahead of schedule on Thursday evening with protesters exchanging flowers with security forces and the interior minister telling demonstrators that police would `protect` them.

But by Friday evening, demonstrations across the country had descended into violence that lef t 24 protesters dead and more than 2,000 wounded, according to the Iraqi Human Rights Commission.

Eight reportedly died in Baghdad alone, with the rest in four southern Iraqi cities. Some had been shot and others sustained wounds from tear gas fire, including from the canisters themselves.

Medical and police sources said around half of those killed on Friday died while trying to storm the of fices of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a powerful armed faction, in two southern cities.

Protesters also set alight more than a dozen political party centres, parliamentary offices and provincial headquarters in the south.

New rallies were reported in the holy city of Karbala as well as Basra, which was swept up in its own wave of protests last year over moribund public services.

Over the course of a week in 2018, outraged protesters burned government and party offices in Basra, but a swift deal between politicians and parliamentarians brought an end to that movement.

Similar grievances sparked this month`s protests: one in five Iraqis still lives in poverty and youth unemployment sits around 25 per cent, according to the World Bank.

The country ranks as OPEC`s second-biggest oil producer and the 12th most corrupt nation in the world, according to Transparency International.

But protesters said this year`s protests were unprecedented because of their independence and the violence with which they were met.

At least 157 people were killed in the first few days of October, according to a government probe, a vast majority of them protesters in Baghdad.-AFP