A blast at an outdoor market in the predominantly Shia northern district of al Shaab killed 38 people and wounded 70, while a auto bomb in the southern neighbourhood of al Rasheed left six dead and another 21 injured.
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Interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan said it was carried out by a female suicide bomber, while a police colonel said a roadside bombing was followed by the suicide attack.
Soon afterwards Islamic State – who are all Sunni extremists -declared online that the attack had targeted members of Shia militias. Baghdad has grown increasingly unstable in recent weeks, despite the Pentagon’s confirmation last week that half of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are based in the city. The attack came less than a week after a massive truck bomb in a crowded market here killed more than 60 and wounded over 80 on May 11.
And as for disrupting the momentum of Iraqi forces against ISIS, the bombing attacks could serve as a distraction to draw these forces away from the territory ISIS still holds in Iraq.
A masked member of an Iraqi Shiite fighters militant group called Kataib Peace Brigades, a Shiite militia group loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, centre, on the street with a flag after a suicide vehicle bombing hit a crowded outdoor market in Sadr City on Tuesday. If Iraqi security forces are struggling to stop unending attacks on Baghdad, the logic goes, they can not move hundreds of miles north to reclaim Iraq’s second largest city…
Abadi has said a political crisis in Baghdad, sparked by his attempt to reshuffle the cabinet in a drive to tackle graft, is hampering the fight against Islamic State and creating space for more insurgent attacks on the civilian population.
Another day of extreme violence hit Baghdad today, as at least 77 people were killed and 140 wounded in a series of bombings across the city.
The bombings are “the clearest evidence that your government has become incapable of protecting you and providing you with security”, al-Sadr said in a statement. At least 58 people have been killed while over hundred injured in three Baghdad blasts, in a wake of nearly daily massacres by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across the country. The Prime Minister has said that resistance to his efforts is paralyzing the Baghdad government and making it hard to combat the Islamic State. It could open the possibility that Iraqi army units are pulled from the front line fighting ISIS to help secure the capital.
IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in June 2014, and later made further advances in Anbar, seizing its capital Ramadi in 2015.
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Fake bomb detectors are still in widespread use in Baghdad, even though James McCormick, the man who marketed them to Iraq, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2013 for fraud in connection with the devices.
