Suicide attack kills 18 in Iraq oasis town

KARBALA, IRAQ // At least five attackers armed with suicide vests, rifles and grenades killed 18 people in the Iraqi oasis town of Ain Al Tamer, many of them guests at a wedding party, local officials said on Monday.

“They were carrying Kalashnikovs, hand grenades. One of them blew himself up and the others were killed by the security forces,” said the head of central Euphrates operations command, Qais Khalaf.

Lt Gen Qais Al Mohammedawi said five suicide bombers took part in the attack. One detonated his bomb while the other four were killed by security forces.

He said they were members of ISIL, which has stepped up attacks on security forces and the country’s Shiite majority in recent months as it has suffered a string of battlefield setbacks.

A local council member and a provincial health directorate source confirmed the death toll in the attack, which took place late Sunday, and said at least 26 others were wounded.

Ain Al Tamer, south-west of Baghdad, is located 50 kilometres from the Shiite holy city of Karbala and on the edge of Anbar province, long a haven for extremists.

It was not immediately what their target was. Five members of the 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 of the local council.

“Some of them were wearing civilian clothes, others military clothes. They infiltrated from the west under the cover of darkness,” he said.

“One of them may have managed to flee. There is an ongoing search,” Mr Mohammed said.

A former mayor of Ain Al Tamer said the attackers started spraying bullets at a nearby wedding party.

“The attack kicked off as people were attending a wedding party in the neighbourhood. Several among the dead and wounded were at the party,” said Mahfouz Al Tamimi, who is now a Karbala provincial council member.

Military commanders said the attackers came from the Anbar desert to the west, a region that is overwhelmingly Sunni and borders Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria.

Iraq’s security forces have for months been battling ISIL fighters in Anbar, notching up key victories in provincial Ramadi and the extremist bastion Fallujah earlier this year.

ISIL recently lost control of an area in Anbar called Jazirat Al Khaldiyeh, a key crossroads that extremists used to move fighters and supplies between fronts since they seized large parts of Iraq in 2014.

The attack on Ain Al Tamer, in which guerrilla fighters doubled up as suicide bombers, bore the hallmark of ISIL.

The extremists call such operations “inghamasi” – which literally means “plunging” and refers to the act of penetrating deep into enemy territory.

* Agence France-Presse, additional reporting from Associated Press