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
