More than 120 killed in ISIL bombings in Iraq and Pakistan

KARACHI AND BAGHDAD // Bombings claimed by ISIL killed more than 120 people in Pakistan and Iraq on Thursday, and injured more than 200 others.

The majority of the casualties were at a Sufi shrine in the town of Sehwan in Pakistan’s Sindh province.

Police said a suicide bomber entered the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, a 13th-century Muslim saint, and blew himself up among the devotees.

The shrine was crowded as Thursday is considered a sacred day for prayers.

“So far 70 people have been killed and more than 150 wounded,” the Sindh provincial police chief A D Khawaja said.

“Many wounded people are in critical condition and they will be shifted to Karachi as soon as navy helicopters and C-130 planes reach the nearest airport.”

Sehwan is about 200 kilometres north-east of Karachi, the provincial capital.

ISIL claimed the attack through its online Amaq propaganda agency, which also attributed a deadly car bombing in southern Baghdad to the extremist group.

That attack was carried out at a busy used-car market in the Bayaa neighbourhood.

At least 52 people were killed and more than 50 others wounded, an interior ministry official said.

He said the emergency services were struggling to cope with the scope of the attack, which ripped through the car market at around 4.15pm, and warned that the death toll may rise.

There was a large crater at the site of the bombing, which is an open space used as a second-hand car market where hundreds of private sellers park their vehicles and wait for prospective buyers.

Both Pakistan and Iraq have been hit by a series of militant attacks this week.

The blast at the car market was in the same neighbourhood where a car bombing killed at least four people on Tuesday.

At least 11 people were killed in a suicide car bombing claimed by ISIL on Wednesday on the edge of the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Sadr City.

In Pakistan, a suicide bombing in Lahore killed 13 people and wounded dozens more on Monday, in an attack claimed by the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction of the Pakistani Taliban. Four suicide bombers struck in the country’s north-west on Wednesday, killing six people.

Thursday’s bombings come as ISIL faces increasing pressure in territory it holds in Iraq and Syria. The extremists were last month driven out of the eastern half of Mosul city, their last major urban stronghold in Iraq. In Syria, government forces and a US-backed coalition of Syrian and Arab fighters are closing in on the city of Raqqa, the group’s self-declared capital.

* Agence France-Presse