A pair of bomb blasts targeting a market in central Baghdad has killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 50, according to police and medical officials.
The early-morning bombs exploded beside car parts shops in al-Sinak, a busy market also selling food, clothes, seeds and other machinery.
Police have given mixed reports from the scene, saying initially it was a pair of back-to-back roadside bombs, but Associated Press news agency claims officers have concluded it was the work of two suicide bombers.
“Twin terrorist attacks were carried out by suicide bombers in Al-Sinek neighbourhood,” said an official from the Baghdad operations command.
Civilians were left picking through debris as medics carried off casualties after what is the deadliest Baghdad attack since the ISIS killing of at least 40 people at a Shia festival in October.
An Agence France-Presse photographer at the scene says torn clothes and mangled iron were strewn across the ground in pools of blood at the site of the weckage near the busy Rasheed street thoroughfare.
“Many of the victims were people from the spare parts shops in the area, they were gathered near a cart selling breakfast when the explosions went off," said nearby shop owner Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, speaking to AFP.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the blasts.
The militant terrorist group claimed responsibility for a bombing that killed 250 people in Baghdad in July, in the worst single terror attack to hit the Iraqi capital since the 2003 war.
ISIS has lost huge parcels of territory this year in the north and west and is fighting off a coalition offensive in its last major stronghold in Mosul.
/257