Baghdad blasts: Death toll hits 83, over 170 injured

New Delhi, Jul 3: The death toll in the Baghdad blasts in two crowded commercial areas has now hit 83 with 176 people injured, a government official confirmed.

Iraq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi toured the site of the blast Sunday morning.

The bombings came near the end of the holy month of Ramadan, when the streets were filled with young people and families out after sundown.

Video footage uploaded to social media showed an angry crowd at the blast site in the Karada district of the capital, with people shouting at the convoy and calling Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a ‘thief'.

Karada, a Shiite-majority neighborhood, was where the first attack struck. A car bomb exploded in this central district, killing 18 people and wounding 45. Shortly afterward, an improvised explosive device went off in eastern Baghdad, killing 5 people and wounding 16. The death toll has since risen.

The officials who provided the casualty figures spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release the information.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in the Karada district in a statement posted on a militant website. The statement said a suicide car bomber targeted Shiites and warned that “the raids of the mujahedeen (holy warriors) against the Rafidha (Shiites) apostates will not stop.”

The statement could not be independently verified.

At dawn Sunday, fire fighters were still working to extinguish blazes at the Karada blast site and bodies were still being recovered from charred buildings. Many of the dead were children, according to a team from The Associated Press at the scene. Ambulances could be heard rushing to the site for hours following the blast. An eyewitness said the explosion caused fires at nearby clothing and cellphone shops.

The Baghdad attacks come just over a week after Iraqi forces declared the city of Fallujah “fully liberated” from IS. Over the past year, Iraqi forces have racked up territorial gains against IS, retaking the city of Ramadi and the towns of Hit and Rutba, all in Iraq's vast Anbar province west of Baghdad.

Despite the government's battlefield victories, IS has repeatedly shown it remains capable of launching attacks far from the front-lines.

Before the launch of the operation to retake Fallujah, Iraq's prime minister was facing growing social unrest and anti-government protests in Baghdad sparked in part by popular anger at the lack of security in the capital. In one month, Baghdad's highly-fortified Green Zone _ which houses government buildings and diplomatic missions _ was stormed twice by anti-government protesters.

IS still controls Iraq's second largest city of Mosul as well as significant patches of territory in the country's north and west.

At the height of the extremist group's power in 2014, IS rendered nearly a third of the country out of government control. Now, the militants are estimated to control only 14 percent of Iraqi territory, according to the office of Iraq's prime minister.

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London mayor Sadiq Khan wins historic 3rd term as Tories routed in local polls

News Network

May 5,2024

London: London's Labour mayor Sadiq Khan on Saturday secured a record third term, as the party swept a host of mayoral races and local elections to trounce the ruling Conservatives just months before an expected general election.

Khan, 53, beat Tory challenger Susan Hall by 11 points to scupper largely forlorn Tory hopes that they could prise the UK capital away from Labour for the first time since 2016.

The first Muslim mayor of a Western capital when initially elected then, he had been widely expected to win as the opposition party surges nationally and the Tories struggle to revive their fortunes.

Hours later in the West Midlands, Conservative mayor Andy Street -- bidding for his own third term -- unexpectedly lost to Labour's Richard Parker, dealing a hammer blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

That narrow loss left the beleaguered leader with only one notable success in Thursday's votes across England, after Tory mayor Ben Houchen won in Tees Valley, northeast England -- albeit with a vastly reduced majority.

In a dismal set of results, Sunak's party finished a humiliating third in local council tallies after losing nearly 500 seats.

"People across the country have had enough of Conservative chaos and decline and voted for change with Labour," its leader Keir Starmer said shortly after confirmation of Parker's victory.

He called the result "phenomenal" and "beyond our expectations".

Writing earlier in Saturday's Daily Telegraph, Sunak had conceded "voters are frustrated" but tried to argue Labour was "not winning in places they admit they need for a majority".

"We Conservatives have everything to fight for," Sunak insisted.

'Spirit and values'

Labour, out of power since 2010 and trounced by Boris Johnson's Conservatives at the last general election in 2019, also emphatically snatched a parliamentary seat from the Tories.

Starmer has seized on winning the Blackpool South constituency and other successes to demand a general election.

Sunak must order a national vote be held by January 28 next year at the latest, and has said he is planning on a poll in the second half of 2024.

Labour has enjoyed double-digit poll leads for all of his 18 months in charge, as previous Tory scandals, a cost-of-living crisis and various other issues dent his party's standing.
On Thursday, it was defending nearly 1,000 council seats, many secured in 2021 when it led nationwide polls before the implosion of Johnson's premiership and his successor Liz Truss's disastrous 49-day tenure.

In the end, they lost close to half and finished third behind the smaller centrist opposition Liberal Democrats.

Meanwhile Labour swept crunch mayoral races across England, from Yorkshire, Manchester and Liverpool in the north to contests across the Midlands.

In London, Khan netted 44 percent of the vote and saw his margin of victory increase compared to the last contest in 2021.

"It's truly an honour to be re-elected for a third term," he told supporters, accusing his Tory opponent of "fearmongering".

"We ran a campaign that was in keeping with the spirit and values of this great city, a city that regards our diversity not as a weakness, but as an almighty strength -- and one that rejects right hard-wing populism," he added.

'Change course'

If replicated in a nationwide contest, the council tallies suggested Labour would win 34 percent of the vote, with the Tories trailing by nine points, according to the BBC.

Sky News' projection for a general election using the results predicted Labour will be the largest party but short of an overall majority.

Speculation has been rife in Westminster that restive Tory lawmakers could use dire local election results to try to replace Sunak.

Despite the returns being at the worst end of estimates, that prospect has not so far materialised.

Ex-interior minister and Sunak critic Suella Braverman warned in the Sunday Telegraph that Sunak's plan "is not working and he needs to change course", urging a more muscular conservatism.

But she cautioned against trying to replace him, warning "changing leader now won't work: the time to do so came and went".

Meanwhile, polling expert John Curtice assessed there were some concerning signs for Labour, which lost control of one local authority and some councillors elsewhere reportedly over its stance on the Israel-Hamas war.

"These were more elections in which the impetus to defeat the Conservatives was greater than the level of enthusiasm for Labour," Curtice noted in the i newspaper.

"Electorally, it is still far from clear that Sir Keir Starmer is the heir to (Tony) Blair."

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