32 die in car-bomb attack in Baghdad
A SUICIDE car-bomb attack in a densely populated neighbourhood of Baghdad yesterday killed at least 32 people and left dozens injured.
Many of the victims were labourers waiting for jobs at an intersection in Sadr City, a sprawling majority Shiite neighbourhood in the northeast of the capital.
Pictures posted on social media shortly after the explosion showed a huge plume of black smoke billowing into the sky and seriously injured people being evacuated.
According to a police colonel, at least 32 people were killed and 61 injured in the blast, the second major attack in Baghdad in three days.
At least 27 people were killed by twin explosions in a busy market area in central Baghdad on Saturday.
The Islamic State (IS) group has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack, saying the “martyrdom operation” had killed about 40 people.
Iraqi police sources said at least 32 people were killed and more than 60 injured when an explosives-laden vehicle went off on a square where daily labourers were waiting for jobs.
Observers have voiced fears that the IS, once it definitively loses its status as a land-holding force, could increasingly revert to targeting civilians in Iraq’s cities.
Meanwhile, French President Francois Hollande said on a visit to Baghdad yesterday that France would fight any French jihadists it found on the battlefields of Iraq, arrest them if they returned home and work to deradicalise their children.
There were about 60 French citizens fighting alongside IS militants in the northern city of Mosul alone and hundreds more in the rest of the country and Syria, French diplomatic sources said.
“We will fight them like [we fight] all jihadists ... since they prepare attacks on our own territory,” Hollande told a news conference.
“We are preparing for these returns and the very particular processing of these children.”
Hollande, whose country has faced a series of militant attacks in the past two years, said French soldiers serving in a US-led coalition against the jihadists were preventing more mass killings at home.
“Everything that contributes to reconstructing Iraq is an additional step to avoiding Daesh strikes on our own territory,” Hollande said, using an Arabic acronym for the IS.
US-backed Iraqi forces are fighting to push the IS, the Sunni Muslim militant group, from Mosul, the fighters’ last major stronghold in the country, but are facing fierce resistance.