Baghdad: A series of bomb blasts, targeting restaurants, jolted Baghdad on Tuesday killing at least 21 persons and injuring more than 50, police and medics said.
Twelve people were killed in Baghdad’s northern Talibiya district when a car bomb blew up directly in front of a restaurant and another in the parking lot.
Another homemade bomb exploded close to a restaurant in Baghdad’s Sheikh Omar neighbourhood, killing two civilians, and one more blasts near restaurants in the south of the capital left a further seven people dead.
The blasts smashed the front of the restaurants, ripping through an outdoor seating area and leaving behind pools of blood on the ground. Broken glass, tables and chairs littered the area, and the mangled, burned remains of cars sat nearby.
The attacks were the latest in a series of bombings targeting members of Iraq’s Shiite majority in the capital that have left more than 50 dead in three days.
There was no immediate claim for the bombings, but the Islamic State (IS) militant group, which has seized large areas of Iraq since June, has said it carried out other similar attacks in recent days. Suicide bombers struck Shiite mosques in Baghdad on Sunday and Monday, killing at least 33 people in total.
IS and other Sunni extremists consider Shiites to be heretics and frequently target them with bombings, the victims of which are almost entirely civilians. Security forces and allied Shiite militiamen have kept IS from attempting to enter the capital in months of heavy fighting, but militants are still able to carry out near-daily bombings in Baghdad.
The Iraqi government has relied on Shiite militias to help resist IS, although some of them were involved in brutal sectarian killings in past years.
With AFP inputs