Iraqi security forces in Baghdad after a double suicide bombing, January 21, 2021. -

Hadi Mizban / AP / SIPA

Thirty-two people were killed Thursday by two Daesh suicide bombers who blew themselves up in a market in central Baghdad, the deadliest attack in more than three years in the Iraqi capital.

A first man set off his explosive belt in the midst of vendors and onlookers in the second-hand clothing market in Tayaran Square, the interior ministry said.

While a crowd was forming to try to come to the aid of the victims, a second suicide bomber detonated his explosives, he added.

The attack was claimed overnight from Thursday to Friday by Daesh.

In addition to the 32 dead, the Minister of Health, Hassan al-Tamimi, reported 110 injured in the metropolis of ten million inhabitants where all the medical personnel were placed on maximum alert.

Organization of legislative

In the square, a busy crossroads of Baghdad, puddles of blood were visible, as were shreds of clothing torn by the explosions, an AFP photographer noted.

Soldiers and paramedics were deployed en masse on the square, the first blocking access and the second busy moving bodies or helping the wounded, in a ballet of ambulances with howling sirens.

An attack with exactly the same modus operandi had already mourned this same place, killing 31 people, almost three years ago 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.

The government had promised the early election of a new parliament for June.

But the authorities are now proposing to postpone it until October, in order to give the Electoral Commission more time to organize the poll.

Reduction of the American presence

On the night of Thursday to Friday, Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack, carried out according to a modus operandi already used in the past by the jihadist group which occupied nearly a third of Iraq in 2014 before Baghdad declared that it had won its 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.

Since the "liberation" however, the jihadist group has claimed only small-scale attacks, usually carried out at night against military positions in isolated areas, far from cities.

The last attacks which killed several people in Baghdad date back to June 2019. This attack comes as the United States reduced the number of its troops in Iraq to 2,500, a drop which "reflects the increase in the capabilities of the Iraqi army In the words of Pentagon chief Christopher Miller.

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