Share

Iraqi council votes to demolish homes of convicted militants

The blast at the entrance to the town of Khales also wounded 37, according to Diyala province police spokesman Colonel Ghalib al-Attiyah and health department spokesman Faris al-Azzawi.

Advertisement

The blasts took place at a police checkpoint, a shopping district and a refugee camp.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but ISIS carries out frequent suicide bombings in Iraq.

Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.

The Sunni militant group recently stepped up its attacks far from the front lines in what Iraqi officials see as an attempt to distract from their battlefield losses.

The decision, approved Tuesday in the Babil provincial capital of Hillah, is a first in Iraq since the 2003 US -led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The ultra-hardline militants have lost much of the territory they seized in 2014 and Abadi has pledged to retake this year the northern city of Mosul, the group’s de facto capital in Iraq. He did not clarify where a family of an offender would go to, once banished from the province.

The council also demanded that Baghdad hand over terrorists on death row for public execution in Babil.

Advertisement

“When ISIS’ army is defeated in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq, there will still be ISIS terrorist cells that will attempt to continue to carry out the kind of terrorist attacks we have seen in Baghdad and elsewhere in recent months”, David Petraeus, the former top USA commander in Iraq, said in an email. “We have grown frustrated with the central government’s efforts to maintain security and execute convicted militants”.

Civilians clean the scene of a suicide bombing at the northern neighborhood of Shula Baghdad Iraq Wednesday