Sunday, July 3, 2016

Baghdad Car Bombing is Third Mass Attack in Days (VIDEO)

It's a daily thing now.

Daily, and on an apocalyptic scale.

At NYT, "More Than 140 Dead in Terror Assault Claimed by ISIS":




BAGHDAD — As celebrations for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan stretched past midnight into Sunday in central Baghdad, where Iraqis had gathered to eat, shop and just be together, a minivan packed with explosives blew up and killed at least 143 people — the third mass slaughter across three countries in less than a week.

The attack was the deadliest in Baghdad in years — at least since 2009 — and was among the worst Iraq has faced since the American invasion of 2003. The bombing came barely a week after Iraqi security forces, backed by American airstrikes, celebrated the liberation of Falluja from the Islamic State, which almost immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Even as fires still blazed Sunday morning at the bombing site, Iraq’s machinery of grief was fully in motion: Hospitals tried to identify charred bodies, workers sorted through the rubble searching for more victims, and the first coffins were on their way to the holy city of Najaf and its vast cemetery, always expanding, where Iraq’s Shiites bury their dead. By Sunday evening, a worker at the cemetery said more than 70 bodies had arrived, and many more were expected on Monday.

Less than two days earlier, two police officers and 20 hostages, many of them foreigners, were killed after gunmen invaded a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Islamic State claimed to be behind that attack. In Turkey, the authorities blamed the Islamic State for a coordinated suicide attack on Istanbul’s main airport that killed more than 40 people, although the terrorist group has not claimed responsibility.

Many of the victims in Baghdad on Sunday were children; the explosives detonated near a three-story complex of restaurants and stores where families were celebrating the end of the school year, residents said...
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