BAGHDAD // A double bombing ripped through a busy market area in central Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 28 people and injuring 53 more and shattering a relative lull in attacks in the Iraqi capital.
ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack via its propaganda website, Amaq.
“Many of the victims were people from the spare parts shops in the area,” said witness ibrahim Mohammed Ali. “They were gathered near a cart selling breakfast when the explosions went off.” said Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, who owns a nearby shop.
The victims were all civilians and the death toll is likely to rise as witnesses said that ambulances were unable to reach the scene easily to pick the injured.
The two suicide bombers were wearing explosive belts, said Brigadier-General Saad Maan, spokesman of the Iraqi interior ministry’s Baghdad Operations Command.
Torn clothes and mangled iron were strewn across the ground in pools of blood at the site of the wreckage near Rasheed street, one of the main thoroughfares in Baghdad, which passes through Al Sinek, a district packed with shops and workshops and teeming with delivery lorries and labourers.
Baghdad has been on high alert since October 17 when an offensive began to recapture Iraq’s second city, Mosul, from ISIL. The extremists have hit back with major diversionary attacks across the country but have had limited success in Baghdad and the city was gearing up to celebrate the New Year for only the second time since the lifting in 2015 of a curfew that had lasted years. Despite the backdrop of insecurity, large crowds were expected to fill the streets and stay out most of the night, as they did last year.
But the bombings, the worst in Baghdad since the beginning of the Mosul offensive, inevitably crushed the desire to celebrate.
“On the last day of 2016 and as Iraqi people are preparing to receive the new year with hopes of peace, the terrorists struck once again at innocent civilians,” the UN’s top envoy in Iraq, Jan Kubis, said in a statement.
* Agence France Presse
