Bomb kills 19 people outside Baghdad mosque

A suicide bomber killed 19 people at a funeral in Baghdad yesterday as an ambush halted Iraqi forces’ advance on a key northern city controlled by Islamic State fighters. The suicide bomber killed 19 and wounded 28 others outside a Shia Muslim mosque, where people were attending a funeral service, in western Baghdad, a police officer and medical official said.

“The attacker approached the entrance of the mosque and blew himself up among the crowd,” the officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity about the attack in the affluent neighbourhood of Harthiya.

Baghdad has witnessed a surge in bombings in the last month, most of them claimed by Islamic State, as the government, headed by prime minister Haider al-Abadi, seeks traction in its effort to subdue Sunni parts of the country that the IS has seized this year.

Elsewhere, Iraqi forces attempted to retake the northern city of Baiji, adjacent to the country’s largest refinery, which continues to be in the hands of the government despite a siege by Islamic State. The military operation, launched in the early hours of Saturday, was held up when an armoured vehicle blew up near the security forces’ convoy in a village some 20 kilometres south of Baiji.

The blast killed four soldiers and wounded seven.

“The attacker surprised our forces as he was driving a military armoured vehicle. We thought it was our vehicle,” said an army major participating in the operation. “We are planning to retake Baiji as soon as possible to secure a key highway and to stop the daily attacks of terrorists on the Baiji refinery,” he said.

The offensive looks to bypass the Iraqi city of Tikrit, which lies to the south of Baiji and is controlled by the IS, and instead to focus on Baiji itself. Iraqi forces have protected the Baiji refinery since June despite being surrounded on all sides after the Iraqi army imploded in the north in the face of a major Islamic State military blitz.

The group holds territory across eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq, with the ambition of establishing rule based upon medieval Islamic precepts. The United States is leading an international coalition in conducting air strikes aimed to defeat the jihadists.

Separately, the fiercest fighting in days shook the Syrian border town of Kobani on Saturday night as Islamic State fighters attacked Kurdish defenders with mortars and car bombs, sources in the town and a monitoring group said yesterday. Islamic State fired 44 mortars at Kurdish parts of the town on Saturday. Some of the shells fell inside nearby Turkey, according to the British- based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said four more mortars were fired yesterday.

The month-long battle for Kobani has ebbed and flowed. A week ago, Kurds said the town would soon fall. The US and its coalition partners then stepped up air strikes on Islamic State, which wants to take Kobani in order to strengthen its position in northern Syria.

The coalition has been bombing Islamic State targets in Iraq since August and extended the campaign to Syria in September, after Islamic State, which espouses a rigid interpretation of Islam and initially fought Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces, made huge territorial gains.

Raids on Islamic State around Kobani have been stepped up, with the fate of the town seen as an important test for US president Barack Obama’s campaign against the Islamists.

Nato member Turkey, whose forces are ranged along the border overlooking Kobani, is reluctant to intervene. It insists the allies should also confront Assad to end Syria's civil war, which has killed close to 200,000. – (Reuters)