Real Madrid issued a statement later on Friday saying the club “deeply regret” that 16 people had died, with more than 20 injured.
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Real Madrid, who are placed second on the league table, just a point behind leaders Barcelona, will play their final league match on Saturday against Deportivo La Coruna.
“Real Madrid extends all of its solidarity to the people of Iraq, who suffer the excessive injustices of extreme violence”, the club said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but the area, which was almost overrun by ISIS militants in 2014, remains around 40 km from a frontline held by Shi’ite militiamen.
Three gunmen opened fire with machine guns around midnight at a cafe in the predominately Shiah Muslim town of Balad where young men, including fans of Spain’s Real Madrid football club, had gathered to start the weekend, police and hospital sources.
Three Islamic State gunmen burst into a café attended by members of a local Real Madrid football fan club in central Iraq, before going on a rampage through the Shiite city of Balad, 80km north of capital Baghdad. Back-to-back bombings on February 28, also in Sadr City, killed 73 people. “They blew themselves up when the security forces and some residents chased them and got close”.
“The government is supposed to put in place certain procedures to protect the people, but they are not offering anything”, said Sheikh Kadhim Jassem, 72.
Of the four suicide blasts on Wednesday, the deadliest was in Baghdad’s Sadr city, killing 63 people and injuring more than 100 others.
Iraq said on Wednesday its military campaign against ISIS had retaken around two-thirds of the territory seized by the militants in their lightning sweep across the country’s north and west in 2014.
An explosives-laden auto bomb ripped through a commercial area in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing and wounding dozens of civilians, a police official said.
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The IS bombings this week exposed lingering gaps in Baghdad’s defences, which are manned by an array of security agencies and militias that don’t always co-operate. “But what they’re good at unfortunately is these terrorist attacks against soft targets”. Reportedly it was when police arrived on the scene that two of the attackers detonated their suicide vests.
