Residents gather at the site suicide car attack at a market in Khan Bani Saad, northeast of Baghdad © Ahmed Saad / Reuters
An explosion at an outdoor market on Sunday in Sadr City, a southern suburb of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, leaving at least 30 people dead and 60 injured, officials said. ISIS militants claim the attack in a statement circulated online.
A police officer reported a bomb ripping through the packed Mredi market in the Shiite district of Sadr City, with a suicide bomber blowing himself up amid the crowd that had gathered at the site of the first bombing only minutes later.
He said those wounded were taken to a near-by hospital. Police sealed off the area of the incident.
This attack was the deadliest In the recent wave of explosions that have hit commercial areas in and outside Baghdad,
Furthermore, in the town of Mahmoudiya, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad, three shoppers were killed and 10 wounded in a bomb explosion, another police officer said. Four others were killed in a separate bomb attack in Baghdad’s southern Dora neighborhood, he added.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, though they bore the hallmarks of the ISIS group, which dominates key areas in northern and western Iraq and targets government forces, and civilians.
The attacks came hours after security forces repelled an attack by IS militants on the capital’s western suburb of Abu Ghraib, officials said.
According to two police officers, three suicide car bombers targeted a security force barracks as gunmen opened fire. The attack left at least 12 members of government and paramilitary security forces dead and 35 wounded, they added. The clashes left a silo on fire.
The commander of military operations in western Baghdad, Maj. Gen Saad Harbiya, said the situation is “under control” and a local curfew has been imposed.
Abu Ghraib, about 29 kilometers (18 miles) from downtown Baghdad, is the location of a prison of the same name where U.S. troops abused Iraqi detainees brutally following the 2003 invasion. Iraqi authorities closed the prison in April 2014 due to the unstable security situation in the surrounding area.
It is halfway between Baghdad and Fallujah, which is controlled by the ISIS group. Security forces prevented ISIS from seizing Abu Ghraib when the extremists swept across northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014.