BAGHDAD — The death toll from a suicide bombing on a busy Baghdad shopping street rose to more than 200 Monday as victims succumbed to their injuries and rescuers pulled out bodies from the charred shops and malls, making it the Islamic State’s deadliest-ever bomb attack on civilians.
Most of those killed died in a huge fire that burned down shops and consumed several small malls after the suicide attacker detonated his explosives-laden car in the Karrada area of Baghdad in the early hours of Sunday.
At the moment of the blast, the street was full of families late-night shopping during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while cafes were packed with young people who had gathered to watch the semifinals in the Euro 2016 soccer tournament.
Iraq is regularly struck by suicide bombings that turn its markets and streets into scenes of horror, but Sunday’s attack was unusually brutal even for a country so torn by violence.It was one of the worst bombings Iraq has seen since the 2003 US-led invasion, and the most deadly carried out by Islamic State militants since the group formed three years ago as an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The bombing followed attacks in Turkey and Bangladesh over the past week that have been linked to the Islamic State, but far outstrips them in the number of people killed. As more were confirmed dead Monday, the death toll climbed past that of the Paris attack last year, when Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people.
The international outpouring of grief, however, was more muted for this city, as the civilians of the Middle East continue to bear the brunt of the bloodshed caused by the militants. Iraqis turned their anger at the government, as well as at bomb detectors that are still widely used in Baghdad but were proved years ago to be fake and have become a symbol of state incompetence.
Officials said hospital records showed that 192 people were killed and more than 250 injured. But they said that figure included only bodies that had been brought to the city’s hospitals and the injured who had died in them.
Ziad Ali al-Yousif, the head of Baghdad’s morgue, said between 30 and 40 more unidentified bodies had been brought directly to the morgue and had not passed through the hospitals, bringing the total death toll to at least 222.
