Death toll from weekend Baghdad attack reaches 175

Two bomb attacks in Baghdad killed at least four people and wounded nine more on Tuesday, just days after an Islamic State suicide vehicle bombing in the Karrada district killed at least 167, wounding another 180.

The Iraqi interior minister has offered to resign after a massive suicide bombing in Baghdad earlier this week killed more than 200 people.

It has not been confirmed that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi will accept it.

Iraqi officials say that 78 people have been killed and 160 wounded in a vehicle bombing carried out by the Islamic State group in the center of Baghdad.

Hours after the bombing, al-Abadi visited the attack site in Karada, but a furious mob surrounded his convoy, yelling expletives, hurling rocks and shoes at the prime minister’s cars and calling him a “thief”.

Al-Ghabban called on the government to hand over security inside the cities exclusively to the Interior Ministry. Iraqi military gains against IS have repeatedly failed to translate into increased security for Iraqi civilians in areas firmly under government control.

He handed over authority to a deputy until Abadi’s decision. As more were confirmed dead Monday, the death toll climbed past that of the Paris attack a year ago, when Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people. Responsibility for the security in Baghdad is divided between the army, federal and local police.

BAGHDAD – As the death toll from the weekend truck bombing in Baghdad climbed to 157, Iraq’s embattled prime minister ordered new security measures, including abandoning the use of bomb-detection wands that US experts pronounced worthless years ago.

The bombing came days before the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan and which begins on Wednesday in Iraq. He also promised to set up a committee to see whether the devices work, describing the problem as “bigger than the Ministry of Interior”. The attack killed three Iraqi policemen and wounded 13 others, according to a hospital official.

He described as “absolutely useless” the checkpoints that are littered throughout capital, which have always been a pillar of government efforts to secure the city. At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Secretary of State John Kerry said Iran was helpful in the war against ISIS. The group did claim the killings of 22 people in Friday’s attack on a cafe in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.

The U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said in a statement from Geneva that the Medina bombing “can be considered a direct attack on Muslims all across the world”. In May, one of the attacks was on a police station and killed several officers. “It is an attack on the religion itself”, the statement said. “All it takes is one house to have at least one man and you have a planning base and launch site for attacks of this type”.

Secretary of State John Kerry has frequently said that attacks, whether conducted by or inspired by the Islamic State, are a sign of the group’s desperation as the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria is chipped away.

The level of destruction in Al-Karrada is massive, with the search for the bodies of missing victims ongoing. Nevertheless, the group apparently remains rooted enough that it recently issued its own caliphate dinar currency, embossed with the words Islamic State. No group has claimed responsibility for that attack, but Turkish authorities say they suspect the IS group is to blame.