Baghdad Car Bombs, Suicide Attacks Kill 35
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Car bombs and suicide attacks targeting mainly Shiite Muslim districts of Baghdad killed 35 people, one of the heaviest recent tolls in the Iraqi capital, which has faced a wave of bombings by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group.
The deadliest attack on Sunday hit the northern Sha’ab neighborhood, where a car bomb followed by a suicide blast killed 19 people, security and medical sources said. The car exploded near a crowded market and, as police and bystanders gathered, an attacker detonated explosives strapped to his body.
In Bunouk district in the capital's northeast, a bomb in a car killed nine people, the sources said. Security forces were sweeping areas nearby, some with sniffer dogs, after receiving information about two further possible bombs, they said.
More than 100 people were wounded in the three explosions, Reuters reported.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the ISIL militants who control much of northern Iraq and the province of Anbar west of Baghdad regularly send bombers into the capital.
Earlier on Sunday, a suicide bomber killed five people in Kadhimiya neighborhood, home to one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, shortly before dusk and the end of the daily Ramadan fast. Another bomb in the Iskan district of western Baghdad killed two people, medical sources said.
Since June 10, 2014, Iraq has witnessed a fresh wave of violence after the ISIL terrorist group took control of large swathes of the war-stricken country.
The ISIL militants made advances in northern and western Iraq in summer 2014, after capturing swaths of northern Syria.
However, a combination of concentrated attacks by the Iraqi military and the volunteer forces, who rushed to take arms after Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued the fatwa calling for fight against the militants, have blunted the edge of the ISIL offensive.