A twin suicide bombing struck a village wedding north of Baghdad as the
wedding party gathered in the evening hours, killing at least 26 people
and wounding dozens, a government spokesman said Thursday.
The attack, which took place late Wednesday, began when one suicide bomber
wearing an explosives-laden belt walked into the wedding party
assembled in an open area in Hajaj, near the city of Tikrit, about 130
kilometers (80 miles) from Baghdad.
The bomber detonated his explosives, only to be followed by the second
attacker who blew himself up when people had gathered to help the
victims of the first explosion, provincial spokesman Ali al-Hamdani told
The Associated Press. He said 26 people were killed, most of them
children, and up to 67 were wounded.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack but
suspicion is likely to fall on the Islamic State group, which has staged
similar attacks in the past. The wedding party was for a family that
had been displaced from Iraq's western Anbar province and that is affiliated with a major anti-IS tribe there.
IS had captured Tikrit during its blitz across Iraq in the summer of
2014 when the Sunni militant group seized nearly a third of the
country's territory. Iraqi forces drove the militants from the city in April 2015, but IS has since then managed to launch deadly attacks in and around Tikrit.
IS has also used large-scale attacks in an effort to distract from its
losses as Iraqi forces battle to retake all of Mosul, the country's
second-largest city, from the group.
Iraqi forces in Mosul have over the past week fought their way into the
heart of the western part of the city, separated by the Tigris River
from the eastern sector, capturing a government complex and the city's
antiquities museum where IS had destroyed priceless relics.
Mosul also fell to IS in the summer of 2014, along with Tikrit and large
swaths of northern and western Iraq, but now remains the militant
group's last significant urban area in the country.
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