Twin Suicide Bombings In Baghdad Marked Deadliest Attack Of The Year With At Least 70 Casualties
The extremist militant group, ISIS, publicly announced that it was responsible for a series of explosions in Iraq's capital city of Baghdad resulting to dozens of people dead amid an ongoing challenge to the country's fragile coalition government composed of fractious alliances and sect rivalries.
Previously, ISIS managed to carve out vast swathes of territories in Iraq's unruly provinces until repulsed by multinational offensives. However, the blasts indicate that the attacks of the radical jihadist are unlikely to stop any time sooner.
According to a Reuters report, two suicide bombers were riding motorcycles while forcing themselves into heavily Shi'ite crowded mobile phone market in Sadr City where the two attackers blew themselves up. The resulting blast killed at least 70 people and injuring 100 more.
People residing in the mainly Shi'ite neighborhood wondered how Sunni extremists managed to breach security.
"It's a Shia-majority area that is subject to heavy security measures, but as we can see those measures aren't quite enough to stop such attacks from happening," observed Al Jazeera's Waleed Ibrahim in his coverage of the Baghdad attacks.
Some pundits view that as ISIS keeps on losing occupied areas due to Kurdish offensives and air raids from US and Russia, the organization may likely resort to deploying its operatives in crowded regions populated mostly by Iraqi Shi'ites.
Furthermore, corruption is likely to make matters worse. Security analysts are tying terrorism to a cocktail of corrupt practices and behavior in government.
"I think it's a cocktail of corruption, low-levels of investment in security and continuing political incompetence that has led to these continued bombings, unfortunately," said Jordan Perry of Verisk Maplecroft as cited by Newsweek.
