IS truck bomb kills 70

CARNAGE: The dead were mostly Iranians returning from Shia pilgrimage

ASUICIDE bombing claimed by the Islamic State group killed at least 70 people, mainly Shia pilgrims, south of Baghdad on Thursday, as Iraqi forces battle to retake Mosul from the jihadists.

The huge truck bomb blast ripped through a petrol station where packed buses returning from the Arbaeen commemoration in Karbala were parked. Most of the dead were Iranians, the largest contingent of foreigners in the pilgrimage.

The attack took place near a village called Shomali, about 120km southeast of Baghdad. IS, which was fighting to defend its Mosul stronghold, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Falah al-Radhi, head of the provincial security committee for Babylon, the province where the bombing happened, said several buses were targeted.

“A large truck exploded among them. It was a suicide attack. There are at least 70 dead, fewer than 10 are Iraqis, the rest are Iranians.”

Videos on social media showed debris scattered over a large area along the highway linking Baghdad to the southern city of Basra.

"There are completely charred corpses at the scene," said Radhi, adding that at least 20 wounded were transferred to hospitals.

The Joint Operations Command in Baghdad said the truck was packed with ammonium nitrate.

Up to 20 million people visited Karbala, home to the mausoleum of Imam Hussein, for Arbaeen this year. According to the Iraqi authorities, around three million of them were Iranians.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi condemned the “brutal and inhumane” attack, the IRNA news agency said.

United States National Security Council spokesman Ned Price also strongly condemned the attack, saying it was “clearly intended to stoke sectarian tensions”.

Iraq had deployed around 25,000 members of the security forces in and around the shrine city to protect the pilgrims from a feared IS attack.

The jihadist group, which was losing ground in Mosul, had carried out a series of high-profile diversionary attacks since Iraqi forces launched a huge offensive against their northern stronghold last month.

Elite forces battled IS jihadists in eastern Mosul on Thursday, looking for fresh momentum in their fiveweek-old offensive to retake Iraq's second city.

Maan al-Saadi, a commander with the Counter-Terrorism Service, said his forces were fighting IS in the neighbourhood of Al-Khadraa.

“They cannot flee. They have two choices — give up or die,” he said. AFP