Qatar- Residents hold protest blaming leaders for Baghdad carnage
Date
5/12/2016 11:06:14 PM
(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Iraqi Shiite men carry the coffin of a victim of the bomb attack a day earlier in Baghdad's Sadr city, during a funeral ceremony in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq, 12 May 2016. According to reports from Iraqi police and hospitals at least 90 people killed and 120 others were wounded in multiple car bomb attacks targeted a crowded market in Sadr city, the Shiite Muslim district of Baghdad. EPA/KHIDER ABBAS
Baghdad: Hundreds of residents of a neighbourhood of the Iraqi capital rocked by a devastating bombing that killed dozens of people held a protest Thursday, blaming the government for the carnage.
Most of the demonstrators were supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who has a massive following in Sadr City, the area where at least 64 people were killed in a car bomb blast on Wednesday.
The attack, the worst to hit the Iraqi capital this year, was claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group, but the demonstrators blamed Iraq's political leaders.
On April 30, Sadr supporters who had been protesting for weeks to demand a cabinet reshuffle and reforms broke into the fortified Green Zone and stormed parliament.
"What happened is a reaction by the politicians, because we entered parliament," said Umm Abbas, a 38-year-old woman whose brother was killed in the bombing.
"Politicians threatened us publicly and we thought there would be a campaign of arrests, but it seems they carried out this explosion instead," she said.
Two other bombings in Baghdad claimed 30 more lives on Wednesday.
AFP