A suicide attack left at least 11 people dead at a gas plant north of Baghdad on Sunday.
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Elsewhere, police and hospital officials say a auto bomb targeting a shopping area in the town of Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of the capital, killed seven people and wounding 18.
Six ISIS militants then tried to storm inside but security forces were able to repel them. Younis said the extent of the damage to the plant was being assessed.
Smoke rises from gas storage tanks after a bomb attack against a state-run cooking gas factory in Taji at Baghdad’s northern outskirts on May 15, 2016.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but IS militants controlling vast swathes of the country’s north and west have conducted bombings this week that killed around 100 people.
In an online statement, ISIS said the attack was carried out by four suicide bombers, for whom it provided noms de guerre.
A total of 24 people were injured in today’s attack.
First a suicide vehicle bombing in the largely Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City killed 64 people.
On Thursday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a police station in western Baghdad, killing three police officers and injuring 10 others, authorities said.
However, despite battlefield successes against IS, Iraq’s political leadership is in disarray as a deepening political crisis has gridlocked government. The group declared an Islamic caliphate on the territory it holds in Iraq and Syria and at the height of its power was estimated to hold almost a third of Iraqi territory.
A U.S.-led coalition backing the Iraqi government in its fight against Islamic State has been training army forces for months at a military base located in Taji.
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“ISIL is using these high-profile terrorist attacks against symbolically important targets in Iraq, such as Shi’i neighborhoods and religious sites, and strategic targets like oil and gas plants, to try to demonstrate that it is potent and attractive to new recruits”, he said.
