AFP/Baghdad
A bomb blast and two mortar rounds targeting Shia worshippers marching to a Baghdad shrine killed six people yesterday in the Iraqi capital, security and medical sources said.
An explosion killed four people and injured 12 near Tahrir Square in central Baghdad, police said.
A medic confirmed the casualty figures but it was not immediately clear whether the blast was caused by a car bomb or a suicide attacker.
Two other people were killed and four wounded by two mortar rounds fired on Boub al-Sham, a neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, the same sources said.
Iraq has deployed 75,000 members of the security forces to protect the droves of worshippers who have been walking for days towards Kadhimiya in northwestern Baghdad.
It is the site of a shrine dedicated to Imam Musa Kadhim, the seventh of 12 revered imams in Shia Islam, who died in 799 AD.
Several major thoroughfares in Baghdad have been blocked to traffic for several days already, bringing the capital to a standstill.
The government declared a national holiday today and tomorrow, which will see the climax of the commemoration.
The marching worshippers and the hundreds of tents along their path where they can rest, eat and drink are considered particularly vulnerable to attacks.
At least seven people were killed in a car bomb attack against worshippers in Baghdad on Saturday.
In other violence yesterday, a roadside bomb blast killed a Kurdish peshmerga major general and three of his bodyguards in the Daquq region, senior officers said.
The device exploded as Major General Salah Dilmani was touring the peshmerga front against the Islamic State group south of the city of Kirkuk, Lieutenant Colonel Ismail Hamid said.
The explosion “led to his martyrdom and that of three of his bodyguards”, peshmerga Colonel Burhan Sheikha said, adding that the blast also wounded five people.
The attack took place in Atshana village near Daquq, about 200km north of Baghdad.
The peshmerga forces of Iraq’s autonomous northern region of Kurdistan have been battling IS militants on several fronts, from Iraq’s northwestern borders with Syria to areas just northeast of Baghdad, near the border with Iran.
Sheikha said Dilmani was the commander of the peshmerga 118th brigade.
*The number of people displaced by conflict in Iraq since the start of 2014 has reached a new high of 2.8mn, the International Organisation for Migration said yesterday.
The IOM put the number at exactly 2,834,676 and said a wave of displacement caused by fighting in Ramadi, the capital of the western province of Anbar, was the cause of the latest rise.
The organisation said that 133,000 people left their homes when IS attacked parts of Ramadi a month ago. More than 16,000 have since returned to the city centre.
IOM Iraq chief of mission Thomas Lothar Weiss said “the quantity of life-saving humanitarian aid available is insufficient.”
There were around 300,000 internally displaced persons in Iraq at the beginning of 2014.
Unrest broke out in Anbar early last year, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes. The biggest wave of displacement occurred when IS launched a huge nationwide offensive on June 9.
The International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday appealed for an additional $38.5mn from donors to fund its emergency response in Iraq.
It “will bring the total funding it requires for 2015 to 122mn, making Iraq its second largest operations in the world, right after Syria”, said the ICRC.
