Baghdad | Two suicide bombers blew themselves up on Thursday in central Baghdad, claiming victims, according to the Iraqi army, a type of attack that had not taken place for more than 18 months in the capital.
The suicide bombing took place in a second-hand clothing market in Tayaran Square, a busy crossroads in Baghdad. A similar attack on the same square left 31 dead three years ago almost to the day.
As in 2018, this attack comes as the authorities are discussing the organization of a legislative election, a deadline regularly accompanied by violence in Iraq.
Immediately after the explosion, heard throughout the center of Baghdad, AFP journalists saw numerous ambulances pouring in to the site of the attack.
Soldiers and paramedics were deployed en masse on the square, the first blocking access and the second busy moving bodies or helping the wounded, noted an AFP photographer.
The army and state television reported the attack, claiming that there were “civilian deaths and injuries” without giving any figures.
The attack was not immediately claimed, but this modus operandi has been used in the past by the Islamic State (IS) group, which occupied nearly a third of Iraq in 2014 before Baghdad says he won his war against the jihadists at the end of 2017.
Since then, jihadist cells have been hiding in the many mountainous and desert areas of the country. So far, however, ISIS has claimed only small-scale attacks, usually carried out at night against military positions in isolated areas, far from cities.
The last attacks that killed several people in Baghdad date back to June 2019.
The authorities are currently proposing to postpone the early legislative elections scheduled for June to October in order to give the Electoral Commission more time to organize the poll. A postponement which remains suspended upon the dissolution of Parliament, a measure which must be voted on by parliamentarians alone.
The attack comes as the United States has reduced its troops in Iraq to 2,500, a drop that “reflects the increased capabilities of the Iraqi military,” in the words of Pentagon chief Christopher Miller.
This reduction “does not mean a change in US policy,” he stressed. “The United States and the coalition forces remain in Iraq to ensure a lasting defeat” of ISIS.
The United States has led an international coalition deployed in Iraq since 2014 to fight ISIS.
Almost all of the troops from other coalition member states left the country in 2020 at the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.