At least 125 dead and 150 injured after ISIS car blast at shopping centre
The car bomb ripped through the marketplace killing scores of people and setting fire to nearby buildings
ISIS has claimed for responsibility for a deadly car bomb attack that ripped through a Baghdad marketplace killing 125 people.
The explosives - hidden inside a refrigerator truck - struck Karada, a busy shopping district in the center of Baghdad, killing scores and wounding at least another 150.
It struck as families and young people were out on the streets after breaking their daylight fast for the holy month of Ramadan.
ISIS - a group claiming adherence to the Sunni branch of Islam - claimed responsibility online, saying it had deliberately targeted Shiites.
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At dawn today fire fighters were still working to extinguish the blazes and bodies were still being recovered from charred buildings.
An eyewitness said the explosion caused fires at nearby clothing and cellphone shops.
The Baghdad attack - along with a second, much smaller and separate bombing yesterday, come just over a week after Iraqi forces declared the city of Fallujah "fully liberated" from ISIS.
Over the past year, they have racked up territorial gains against ISIS, retaking the city of Ramadi and the towns of Hit and Rutba, all in Iraq's vast Anbar province west of Baghdad.
But despite the government's battlefield victories, ISIS has repeatedly shown it remains capable of launching attacks far from the front-lines.
ISIS still controls Iraq's second largest city of Mosul as well as significant patches of territory in the country's north and west.
At the height of the extremist group's power in 2014, ISIS rendered nearly a third of the country out of government control. Now, the militants are estimated to control only 14 percent of Iraqi territory, the government claims.
The attacks also come just a day after ISIS jihadis killed at least 20 foreigners at a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The militants, most of whom were killed in an ensuing police raid, stabbed to death hostages who could not recite verses from the Koran, it was claimed.
