Iraq death toll from IS bombing of Baghdad market now at 73

No one immediately claimed responsibility for that attack.

Iraqi military officials said the aim of the operation is to cut off IS supply lines and to tighten the grip of government forces around the IS-held northern city of Mosul. The statement did not say whether the US-led worldwide coalition was involved in the operation.

He said two vehicles loaded with militants were bombed today, and that the security forces managed to hit a would-be suicide auto bomber before he reached his target.

The attack comes after a Sunday bombing at a market in a Shia area of northern Baghdad.

Meanwhile, four suicide bombers disguised in army uniform struck at dawn at the military headquarters in the city of Haditha, 150 miles north-west of Baghdad, killing eight troops, including a local army commander. A further 58 people were wounded, the sources said.

The bombing in Muqdadiya, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Baghdad, killed six local commanders of the Hashid Shaabi umbrella group of Shi’ite militias who were attending the funeral ceremony, security officials and police in Diyala said.

The head of Muqdadiya’s City Council, Adnan al-Tamimi, a member of the Shia community, told Amnesty on that the number of people killed was exaggerated and said those killed were not only Sunni men targeted by Shia militias. The solider was critically wounded, he added.

A suicide bomber blew himself up at a funeral for the relative of a Shi’ite Muslim militia commander in Iraq’s eastern province of Diyala on Monday, killing at least 27 people in an attack claimed by Islamic State. The attack was the deadliest in a wave of recent explosions that have targeted commercial areas in and outside Baghdad.

Hospital officials confirmed the updated toll.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information. A coalition spokesman said that offensive was in response to the group’s losses in the provincial capital of Ramadi, which Iraqi forces recaptured in December.