Baghdad: The Daesh terror group has claimed responsibility for a car bombing in Iraq’s southern, predominantly Shiite city of Basra that killed at least 10 people on Monday.
Daesh said in a statement posted on a Twitter account linked to the group that it carried out Monday’s attack in Basra’s southwest suburb of Al Zubair, targeting Shiites. The Sunni-dominated Al Zubair is located 50 kilometreskilometres southwest of Basra.
The attack was part of a series of bombings across Iraq that killed at least 56 people on Monday, including 35 in a single blast north of Baghdad.
“At least 10 people were killed” in Al Zubair, said Jabbar Al Saadi of the Basra provincial council’s security committee, adding that 24 people were wounded.
The explosion, which occurred around 5.30pm, rocked a market area known as Souk Al Halaqin in Al Zubair, just 10 kilometres southwest of the oil hub of Basra, he said.
Bombings are rare in Iraq’s south, which is predominantly Shiite and hard to penetrate for radical Islamist groups responsible for most such attacks in Baghdad and other parts of the country.
“The soldiers of the caliphate managed to detonate a parked car bomb amidst a gathering of polytheist Rafidha in Basra,” said the Daesh claim posted on social media. Daesh routinely uses the pejorative term Rafidha to refer to Shiite Muslims.
The Basra region has been spared the violence unleashed on other parts of Iraq by Daesh since last year, but feuds between rival Shiite armed groups and criminal gangs have risen lately.
In the blast in the market area of Khalis, around 55 kilometres from the capital, at least 35 people and wounded 74, a senior police officer said.
Local councillor Uday Al Hadran as well as medical sources in Khalis and in the provincial capital Baquba confirmed the casualty toll.
Diyala, a religiously and ethnically mixed province that Daesh partly took over last year, was declared liberated by the government in January.
The terrorists, who consider Shiites heretics, no longer have fixed positions in the province, but have reverted to their old tactics of planting car bombs and carrying out suicide operations or hit-and-run attacks.
In Hussainiyah, barely 20 kilometres north of Baghdad, a car bomb detonated in a busy area, killing five people and wounding at least 17, a police colonel said.
According to figures released by the UN Mission in Iraq on Thursday, 717 Iraqis were killed and 1,216 wounded in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict in September.
The Baghdad governorate accounted for 257 of the deaths.
The United Nations says its figures account only for the casualties that can be verified, and are likely to be far below reality.
