The two journalists were part of a group of reporters who yesterday went to the area to cover the attacks in the town of Muqdadiyah, where 27 people were killed and 55 were wounded in the explosion from several devices in a cafeteria. Another blast in a southeastern Baghdad suburb of Nahrawan killed seven more people and injured 15 others. But lately, as the Islamic State, whose predecessor was al-Qaida in Iraq, has focused on holding the territory it controls, Baghdad has been relatively safer.
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Haqqi al-Jabouri, a member of the local council in Diyala province where Muqdadiya is located, said both types of attacks hurt the social fabric of the community.
“The scene was awful, and I will never forget it because of the child”, said 48-year-old Haitham Ali, who had witnessed the incident and was able to carry the body of a dead child who was killed by the suicide bomber.
Seventeen people died during the evening rush on Monday in eastern Baghdad when Islamic State militants attacked a shopping mall.
At the height of Iraq’s civil war almost a decade ago, such mosque attacks often unleashed revenge killings and counter attacks across the country.
The outside of the cafe in Muqdadiya after two blasts on January 12.
Twin bombings in Muqdadiyah killed 20 people at a cafe the night before, and attackers subsequently blew up multiple Sunni mosques and burned houses and shops, officers said. Reuters reports that the “United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is still waiting for the green light from the Iraqi government to enter the city and start work to rebuild it, the resident representative for the organization in Iraq, Lise Grande said”.
Sharqiya is a Sunni-owned TV channel viewed as sympathetic to the country’s Sunni Arab minority.
A security official in Anbar province on Monday said ground advances backed by US-led coalition air strikes killed about two-dozen insurgents and pushed others out of areas near the government-held city of Haditha in Iraq’s northwest.
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The attack also underscored what many fear will happen as the Islamic State loses territory in places like Ramadi: that the group will return to its days as a guerrilla force trying to instill terror by carrying out attacks en masse.
