ISIS has claimed responsibility for a deadly car bomb explosion Thursday in southwestern Baghdad, according to a statement released by ISIS-affiliated Amaq News Agency.
The blast killed 51 people and wounded at least as many others, Gen. Saad Maan, spokesman for Baghdad’s Operations Command, said in a statement.
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The attack targeted a busy car market in the predominately Shiite al-Bayaa district of the Iraqi capital, a security official told CNN.
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Even before the ISIS statement began circulating among supporters on social media, the US State Department blamed the terror group for the massacre.
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“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the horrible terrorist attacks carried out by ISIS targeting a car dealership in Baghdad, Iraq, today,” said Mark Toner, the department’s acting spokesman. “We extend our deepest condolences to the victims’ families and friends, and wish a full and quick recovery to those injured.”
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A burned-out car sits at the site of a deadly bombing Thursday in Baghdad.
A constellation of warring factions have seemingly set aside deadly disputes to take part in one of Iraq’s toughest challenges yet — clearing ISIS out of its last major stronghold in the country.
A successful offensive to recapture Mosul could boost desperately needed national unity, restore the pride of an army that was humiliated when it fled ISIS in 2014 and rip the heart out of the group’s self-declared caliphate.
But the tinderbox coalition of anti-ISIS fighters that began its march on Iraq’s second-largest city earlier this month, as well as the combustible mix of the city’s ethnic and sectarian groups, risks triggering yet more bloodshed even after the jihadists have gone.
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Iraqi forces targeting ISIS militants south of Mosul on Wednesday. STRINGER / Reuters
Two Yazidi women and former ISIS sex slaves were awarded the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on Thursday. The honor is given to those “who have made an exceptional contribution to the fight for human rights across the globe.”
Nadia Murad Basee Taha, 23, and Lamiya Aji Bashar, 18, were both enslaved by ISIS when their Iraqi village was attacked by militants on Aug. 3, 2014. ISIS militants rounded up groups of Yazidi men and murdered them, before enslaving scores of young women.
The families of Murad and Aji Bashar were either killed or enslaved, but the two women escaped, and have since become human rights activists, fighting human trafficking, Yazidi genocide and ISIS enslavement.
Shortly after last November’s attacks on Paris by a Brussels-based Islamic State cell, a top U.S. counter-terrorism official traveling in Europe wanted to visit Brussels to learn more about the investigation.
When the official tried to arrange meetings, however, his Belgian counterparts were not welcoming, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. The Belgians indicated it was a bad time to speak to foreign officials as they were too busy with the investigation, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.
Belgian officials declined to comment on the incident.
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Vincent Kessler/Reuters Several U.S. officials also say that security cooperation has been hampered by Brussels’ patchy intelligence-sharing and some agencies’ unwillingness to work with foreign countries.
Abu Khaled looked at me across the outdoor hookah café table in the touristy Laleli district of Istanbul. Across the street cars nearly careened into each other every other second in a busy interaction, semi-subterranean shops, their windows half-buried by the pavement, advertised everything from cellphones to toothpaste to the latest designer women’s fashions—or, at any rate, cheap knockoffs for those who didn’t know the difference or much care. Amid the din of an international city at rush hour was the scheduled call of the muezzin, leading the call to prayer, and an unremitting stream of awful European pop music being pumped through the café’s loudspeakers, which we’d asked in vain to have turned down.
Even though ISIS terror had struck inside Turkey the week before, the organization calling itself the Islamic State, al-Dawla al-Islamiya, felt very far away. Truly, Abu Khaled told me, the people who run it want their subjects to live as if in a world of their own, captive minds in a closed society. But the real world is a small place, and this defector from the ISIS intelligence services said he was not the only one who had grown restive.
Police officers hunting suspects involved in the Paris terror attacks exchanged gunfire during an apartment raid in the suburb of Saint-Denis early Wednesday. Before the seven-hour operation ended, two suspects were dead and seven others had been taken into custody.
The suspects who died were not identified, but French President François Hollande confirmed their link to the attacks that swept Paris Friday night, killing at least 129 people. One of the suspects was a woman who perished after detonating a bomb at the scene, the French prosecutors’ office said.
Police said multiple suspects related to the Paris attacks were believed to be holed up in the apartment, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged mastermind, Agence France-Presse reports. Salah Abdeslam, whom authorities have been hunting for since Saturday, was also believed to be inside.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Islamic State warned in a new video on Monday that countries taking part in air strikes against Syria would suffer the same fate as France, and threatened to attack in Washington.
The video, which appeared on a site used by Islamic State to post its messages, begins with news footage of the aftermath of Friday’s Paris shootings in which at least 129 people were killed.
The message to countries involved in what it called the “crusader campaign” was delivered by a man dressed in fatigues and a turban, and identified in subtitles as Al Ghareeb the Algerian.
Believing that Islamic State captives held on a compound in northern Iraq faced “imminent mass execution,” dozens of U.S. special operations troops and Iraqi forces raided the site Thursday, freeing approximately 70 Iraqi prisoners in an operation that saw the first American killed in combat in the country since the U.S. war against IS began in 2014, officials said.
The raiders killed and captured a number of militants and recovered what the Pentagon called a trove of valuable intelligence about the terrorist organization.
The U.S. service member who died was not publicly identified pending notification of relatives. Officials said this was the first American combat death in Iraq since the U.S. began its counter-IS military campaign in August 2014.
In Calgary, between the soccer practices and the hours at her accounting job and the potlucks with the neighbors, Christianne Boudreau spent every spare minute watching Islamic State videos, her nose pressed up against the computer screen.
She sat in the basement of her middle-class home in her middle-class suburb, a bare room that once belonged to her eldest son, Damian, and watched men posturing with big guns like teenagers. She watched firefights. She watched executions. But Boudreau barely registered any of the bloodshed. She was focused on the faces behind the balaclavas, trying to spot her son’s eyes.
In Copenhagen, Karolina Dam was wild with fear. Her son Lukas had been in Syria for seven months. Three days earlier, she received word that he had been injured outside Aleppo, but she was convinced that he was dead. Sitting alone that evening, nervously puffing on a vaporizer, she couldn’t stop herself from sending a Viber message into the ether. “Lukas,” she wrote, “I love you so much my beloved son. I miss you and want to hug and smell you. Hold your soft hands in mine and smile at you.”
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
ISIS purportedly claimed responsibility for the Tunisia Bardo Museum massacre in an online audio recording posted on a website linked to the group, analysts said Thursday.
An unsigned statement identified the two dead attackers as “Abu Zakaria al-Tunisi” and “Abu Anas al-Tunisi” and called them “knights of the Islamic State,” according to security analysts Flashpoint Intelligence.
An audio version of the claim said that the attack targeted “citizens of the Crusader countries” and that Allah had “brought terror to the hearts of the infidels.”
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A burned-out car sits at the site of a deadly bombing Thursday in Baghdad.
Photo Illustration Daily Beast
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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James' World 2 