An Islamic State car bomb killed 24 people in a busy square in Baghdad’s sprawling Sadr City district yesterday and the militants also temporarily cut a key road north from the Iraqi capital to Mosul, their last major stronghold in Iraq.
Islamic State said in an online statement it had targeted a gathering of Shias.
Sixty-seven people were wounded in the blast.
At least four other attacks across the city, some also claimed by Islamic State, killed nine more people, bringing the total death toll from bombings in Baghdad over the past three days to more than 60.
In addition, seven policemen were killed near the southern Iraqi city of Najaf on Sunday.
The upsurge in violence comes as US-backed Iraqi forces are fighting to push Islamic State from the northern city of Mosul, where the militants are putting up fierce resistance.
Islamic State said yesterday’s attacks were revenge for “the repeated targeting of health institutions in Nineveh province” by the US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces.
That was an apparent reference to two air strikes last month on hospitals in eastern Mosul, one where Iraqi forces were under attack and another which the US military said had targeted militants sitting in a van.
At least one of the strikes may have caused civilian casualties.
Islamic State has lost most of the territory it seized in a blitz across northern and western Iraq in 2014 and ceding Mosul would probably spell the end of its self-styled caliphate.
But it would still be capable of waging a guerrilla-style insurgency in Iraq and plotting or inspiring attacks on the West.
“The terrorists will attempt to attack civilians in order to make up for their losses, but we assure the Iraqi people and the world that we are able to end terrorism and shorten its life,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said after talks with visiting French President Francois Hollande.
Yesterday’s blast in Sadr City hit a square where day labourers typically gather.
Nine of the victims were women in a passing minibus, whose charred bodies were visible inside the burnt-out remains of the vehicle.
Blood stained the ground nearby.
A parked car bomb targeting a Sunni religious figure near a mosque in western Baghdad killed five people, and another blast close to a hospital in the centre killed one civilian and wounded nine, police and medical sources said.
In the southeastern Zaafraniya district, two more people were killed and seven wounded when a car bomb exploded.
A bomb affixed to a vehicle in the eastern area of Baladiyat killed one person and wounded four.
A service member from the international coalition fighting Islamic State was killed in a “non-combat related incident” yesterday, the US military said.
It did not disclose the name, nationality or circumstances surrounding the incident but said it was investigating.
Since the drive to recapture Mosul began on Oct 17, elite forces have retaken a quarter of the city in the biggest ground operation in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussain.
Abadi has said the group will be driven out of the country by April.
Clashes continued in and around Mosul yesterday.
Meanwhile, militant gunmen wearing suicide vests stormed a police station in the Iraqi city of Samarra yesterday, sparking clashes with the security forces, officials said.
“There was a terror attack on Mutawakil police station, now the Iraqi forces are besieging them,” interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan told reporters.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in central Samarra, a city 110km north of Baghdad, via its propaganda agency Amaq.
Maan said the attackers holed up inside the police station were exchanging fire with the security forces besieging them.
A police major from Salaheddin province where Samarra is located said five attackers had already been killed and added that reinforcements had been deployed.
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