Baghdad: An attack by the Daesh group on a crowded marketplace in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province has killed 115 people, including women and children, in one of the deadliest single attacks in the country in the past decade.
The mostly-Shiite victims were gathered to mark the end of Ramadan.
Police said a small truck bomb detonated in a crowded marketplace in the town of Khan Beni Sa’ad on Friday night in what quickly turned celebrations into a scene of horror, with body parts scattered across the market. At least 170 people were injured in the attack, police officials said, speaking anonymously because they were not authorised to brief the media.
Men quickly emptied boxes of tomatoes to use them for carrying the bodies of small children, witnesses said, while adult victims lay scattered around the attack scene waiting for medical assistance.
“Khan Bani Sa’ad has become a disaster area because of this huge explosion,” Diyala resident Saif Ali said. “This is the first day of Eid, hundreds of people got killed, many injured, and we are still searching for more bodies.”
Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on Twitter accounts associated with the militant group.
Iraq’s speaker of parliament, Salim Al Jabouri, said on Saturday that the attack has struck an “ugly sectarian chord,” and added that the government is making “attempts to regulate Daesh’s terror from destabilising Diyala security”. But anger is rife in the volatile province, where a number of towns were captured by Daesh last year. Iraqi forces and Kurdish fighters have since retaken those areas, but clashes between the militants and security forces continue.
“We went out to the market for shopping and preparations for Eid,” said another resident, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution. “But this joy has turned to grief and we have lost family, friends and relatives, all because of this government’s failure to provide us with security.”
Security forces were out in full force across Diyala on Saturday, with dozens of new checkpoints and security protocols immediately implemented in the wake of Friday’s attack. Daesh has been behind several similar large-scale attacks on civilians or military checkpoints as it seeks to expand its territory. The group currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria.
In August last year, at least 64 people were killed in an attack on a Sunni mosque in Diyala in what locals believed was a retaliatory attack against Diyala tribes that refused to proclaim loyalty to Daesh.
The United States has spent billions arming and training the Iraqi military, but it performed poorly last year when Daesh militants swept across western and northern Iraq, routing four divisions. The US and a coalition of nations have been conducting airstrikes on Daesh positions in Iraq and Syria since last year, but it has not stopped the group from making advances. The militants recently captured the city of Ramadi, in Iraq’s western Anbar province, and the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria.
Diyala, which borders Iran, is the only province in Iraq where Iranian jets are known to have conducted air strikes against Daesh earlier this year.
