Suicide attackers kill 18 at wedding party in Iraq

Agencies
In this Aug. 27, 2016 picture, Iraqi soldiers detain local men for security checks in Qayara, 70 km south of Mosul, which they recaptured from the Daesh terrorist group. On Monday, five suspected Daesh suicide attackers killed 18 people in the Iraqi oasis town of Ain Al-Tamer, southwest of Baghdad. (AP Photo)

KARBALA, Iraq: Daesh group has claimed it was behind a suicide attack that killed 18 people near Karbala, southwest of Baghdad.
Five attackers armed with suicide vests, rifles and grenades killed its victims at a wedding party in the oasis town of Ain Al-Tamer, southwest of Baghdad, local officials said Monday. All the attackers were killed by security forces.
“They were carrying Kalashnikovs, hand grenades. One of them blew himself up and the others were killed by the security forces,” the head of the central Euphrates operations command, Qais Khalaf, said.
A member of the local council and a source at the provincial health directorate confirmed the death toll in the attack, which took place late on Sunday, and said at least 26 people were also wounded.
A statement on the Amaq news agency that supports Daesh said the attack was carried out by four of its suicide fighters against a “gathering of Shiites.”
Initial reports in local media late, citing security sources, blamed the killings on a dispute between two tribes at the wedding party.
Ain Al-Tamer is located about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of the holy Shiite city of Karbala and lies on the edge of the province of Anbar, which was long a haven for jihadists.
Officials said the attackers started opening fire in a neighborhood of Ain Al-Tamer at around 1830 GMT on Sunday, although it was not immediately what their target was.
Five members of a same family were among the dead, according to a health official from Karbala province.
“The five terrorists were carrying lots of weapons and one of them blew himself up in the midst of our citizens,” said Farhan Jassem Mohammed, from the local council.
The military commanders said the attackers came from the Anbar desert to the west.
Karbala lies on the edge of the sprawling province of Anbar, which is overwhelmingly Sunni and has borders with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria.
Iraq’s security forces have for months been battling Daesh fighters in Anbar, notching up key victories in the capital Ramadi and jihadist bastion Fallujah earlier this year.
Daesh claimed a truck bomb that killed at least 325 people in Baghdad’s Karrada shopping street in July, the deadliest attack since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.