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Isis claims responsibility for Baghdad car bombing that killed 86 Isis claims responsibility for Baghdad car bombing that killed 86
(about 2 hours later)
At least 91 people have been killed and 176 wounded in two separate bomb attacks in Baghdad, Iraqi officials have said. Days after fleeing its stronghold of Falluja, Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an attack on a shopping district in central Baghdad, which killed at least 86 people, and again exposed the frailty of security efforts to protect Iraqi citizens.
In the deadliest attack, a car bomb hit Karada, a busy shopping district in the centre of the Iraqi capital, killing 86 people and wounding 160, according to police and hospital officials. The explosion was the most lethal single attack in Baghdad this year. A second bombing took the toll to at least 93, equalling the most deadly day in the capital so far this year, and rivalling other mass death counts throughout the 12-year insurgency.
It struck as families and young people were out on the streets after breaking their daylight fast for the holy month of Ramadan on Sunday morning.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombing in a statement posted online, saying it had deliberately targeted Shia Muslims. The jihadist group considers Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority to be heretics and frequently targets them in attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere. The statement could not be independently verified. In May, the capital was rocked by a series of blasts that killed more than 150 people in seven days.
Related: Falluja fully liberated from Islamic State
Firefighters were still working to extinguish the blazes and bodies were still being recovered from charred buildings at dawn on Sunday. Many of the dead were children, according to reporters at the scene. Ambulances could be heard rushing to the site for hours after the blast. A witness said the explosion caused fires at nearby clothing and cellphone shops.
Men carried the bodies of two victims out of one burned building and a crowd looked on from the rubble-filled street as firefighters worked at the site.
Isis issued a statement claiming the suicide car bombing, saying it was carried out by an Iraqi as part of the group’s “ongoing security operations”.
Hours after the bombing, Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, visited the blast site. Video footage uploaded to social media showed an angry crowd, with people calling Abadi a “thief” and shouting at his convoy.
In the second attack, an improvised explosive device went off in eastern Baghdad, killing five people and wounding 16. No group claimed responsibility for the attack.
The casualty figures were confirmed by police and hospital officials, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorised to release information to the press.
The Baghdad attacks come just over a week after Iraqi forces declared the city of Falluja “fully liberated” from Isis. Over the past year, Iraqi forces have racked up territorial gains against Isis, retaking the city of Ramadi and the towns of Hit and Rutba, all in Iraq’s vast Anbar province west of Baghdad.
Related: Millions of Iraqi children repeatedly and relentlessly targeted, says UNRelated: Millions of Iraqi children repeatedly and relentlessly targeted, says UN
Despite the government’s battlefield victories, Isis has repeatedly shown it remains capable of launching attacks far from the front lines. Isis said it had deliberately targeted Shia Muslims by striking the suburb of Karrada, on the southern bank of the Tigris river.
Before the launch of the operation to retake Falluja, Iraq’s prime minister was facing growing social unrest and anti-government protests in Baghdad sparked in part by popular anger at the lack of security in the capital. In one month, Baghdad’s highly fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and diplomatic missions, was stormed twice by anti-government protesters. It struck as families and young people were out on the streets after breaking their daylight fast for the holy month of Ramadan late on Saturday evening. Firefighters were still working to extinguish the blazes and bodies were still being recovered from charred buildings as dawn broke on Sunday.
Isis still controls Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, as well as significant patches of territory in the country’s north and west. The group’s statement implied it drew no distinction between civilians and security forces with whom it is battling to retain control of the more than a third of the country that it overran in mid-2014 in a rampage that threatened Iraq’s ongoing viability.
At the height of the extremist group’s power in 2014, Isis put nearly a third of the country out of government control. Now, the militants are estimated to control only 14% of Iraqi territory, according to the office of the prime minister. Two years later, Isis has lost at least half of that territory and is increasingly resorting to the guerilla tactics that characterised its rise from 2004. Then and now, suicide car bombs, like that used in Karrada, have been central to the organisation’s operations.
Baghdad has been struck upwards of 1,000 times, Iraqi officials claim, with the vast majority of those attacks targeting civilian areas frequented by the majority Shia sect, such as market places, shopping strips, religious gatherings and shrines.
Bombings of this scale are less frequent than they were during the darkest years of the sectarian insurgency from 2006-07. However, to many Iraqis, their impact seems all the more shocking at a time when the state military, heavily backed by Shia militias and US-led airstrikes, appears to be prevailing on the battlefield.
The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, has repeatedly assured the country that he will restore security to towns and cities and a semblance of order to the country’s finances, which have been plundered by the industrial-scale corruption of all levels of officialdom.
His efforts to push through a crackdown on corruption have so far failed, but the surprise move to launch an operation to seize Falluja, on the western outskirts of Baghdad, has been hailed as a success, after the last remaining Isis fighters last week fled the city, following close to one month of attacks.
“Isis is attuned to symbolism, and this was in part payback for Falluja,” said an Arab intelligence official based in the region. “They want Abadi to know that they still live among them. And, despite their losses, they haven’t gone anywhere.”
Before the attack, a senior member of Isis told the Guardian that relentless airstrikes in Iraq and Syria had caused serious damage to the organisation and would eventually defeat the group militarily.
“The Russians are bombing our families and our areas, but not us,” he said. “The Americans are bombing us and they have good information. The situation is much worse than it was. Morale is not good.”
With the fall of Falluja, Isis has now lost three of the cities it seized in 2014. Mosul, Iraq’s second city, remains the terror group’s last urban stronghold. It also retains influence in Anbar province and has effective control over much of a 500-mile stretch of the border with Syria. However, less than 15% of the country is now thought to be under its control.
In Syria, a US-backed militia, made up mostly of Syrian Kurds allied to the YPG, as well as some Arab fighters, has been trying to cut the road between the second Isis vanguard of Raqqa and al-Bab, which is its westernmost stronghold. The battle to seize Minbij, roughly halfway between the two cities, slowed on Sunday, after Isis counterattacked using car bombs, forcing back the Kurdish-led force.
The Iraqi victory in Falluja appears to have come at less of a cost to the city than similar wins in Ramadi and Tikrit, which saw much of each city destroyed. Refugees from Falluja remain housed in camps in the desert near the city in searing mid-summer temperatures. Officials say many districts of Falluja remain unsafe, due to large numbers of mines and improvised bombs left by Isis as they fled.
Related: Falluja fully liberated from Islamic State
Before the Falluja fight, US officials had been urging Iraq to instead focus energies on seizing Mosul, which is widely regarded as Isis’s centre of gravity. Several efforts by Iraqi troops to push towards Mosul earlier this year had been quickly rebuffed by militants encamped in towns and villages to the south-east of the city.
At least 40 villages must be cleared by Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces before they reach Mosul from the south-east. The city is also encircled by villages from all other approaches, meaning a path to its centre is likely to be more prolonged and bloody.
However, both US and senior Iraqi officials are optimistic that Falluja will provide a fillip to Iraqi forces gearing up to move on Mosul, some of whom had been shown up in battle as underprepared and lacking in motivation. US planners had been hoping to start the Mosul operation this autumn. Those plans have slipped, but there is a growing belief that an invasion force may be ready by early next year.