The Islamic State (IS) group has staged a suicide attack on a gas factory near Baghdad in which 14 people were killed and 20 wounded, Iraqi officials say.
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When additional Iraqi forces massed at the gate for an attack, “our brothers detonated a auto bomb in the middle of their gathering”, it went on, saying that the militants clashed with security forces and detonated explosive belts among them. Other news outlets were reporting different numbers of victims, including workers and security forces.
Iraq’s Oil Ministry said the attack had not disrupted the plant’s production of gas for cooking and electricity production.
He said the officers charged with guarding the plant had only light weapons compared to the ISIS attackers, and that an elite response team arrived at the incident hours after the attack began.
“Civil defense forces managed to extinguish the fire”, he said in a statement released to Rudaw.
Daesh, a terror group controlling areas in west and north, has claimed responsibility for the violence which has left more than 140 killed since Wednesday. More than a dozen people were hurt in the blast.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, three separate bomb attacks targeted commercial areas, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 28 others, police and m edical officials said.
However, the military operations were impeded by a political crisis as parties could not reach a compromise on a government reshuffle.
In the past month, IS has lost a swath of key territory along a supply route in Iraq’s vast western Anbar province that the extremists had used to ferry fighters and supplies between Iraq and Syria.
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“We have seen this declaration of emergency in Raqqa, whatever that means”, Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for the U.S.-led anti IS coalition, was quoted as saying by CNN.
