On September 12th 2018, a suicide car bomber detonated outside a restaurant near Beiji city, in Iraq’s Salahuddin governorate. The blast left six dead and 42 injured when it targeted the restaurant.
Most casualties were reported to be from a group of Iraqi tourists travelling on board a bus that stopped at the restaurant.
Whilst no group claimed responsibility, the city had formerly been held by ISIS in 2014 and bore the hallmarks of an ISIS attack.
Though such attacks have drastically decreased over 2018, ISIS still has the ability to carry out sporadic attacks, particularly in locations where they previously had a strong presence.
In recent months, though Iraq has seen the number of civilian casualties from explosive violence consistently falling, it is still often amongst the countries worst impacted each month.
In 2017, the monthly average was 548 civilian casualties from explosive violence in Iraq. So far this year, the monthly average has been less than 150 per month.
AOAV calls for states and international organisations to work collaboratively to generate greater awareness of the number of civilians killed and injured each year by IEDs, and encourage a greater stigma from political, religious and social leaders on the use of IEDs.
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