ISIS attacks Iraqi gas plant, other sites; 29 die

Iraqi firefighters battle a blaze at a natural gas plant in Taji, Iraq, 12 miles north of Baghdad. According to Iraqi officials, the Islamic State militant group launched a coordinated assault on the plant.
Iraqi firefighters battle a blaze at a natural gas plant in Taji, Iraq, 12 miles north of Baghdad. According to Iraqi officials, the Islamic State militant group launched a coordinated assault on the plant.

BAGHDAD -- The Islamic State militant group launched a coordinated assault on a natural gas plant north of Baghdad that killed at least 14 people, while a string of other bomb attacks in or close to the capital killed 15 others, Iraqi officials said.

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AP

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire Sunday at a natural gas plant in Taji, Iraq.

The attack on the gas plant started at dawn Sunday with a suicide car bomber hitting the plant's main gate in Taji, about 12 miles north of Baghdad. Then several suicide bombers and militants broke into the plant and clashed with the security forces, an official said, adding that 27 troops were wounded.

The Islamic State-affiliated Aamaq news agency credited a group of "Caliphate soldiers" for the attack.

Closed-circuit television showed the explosion at the plant. Pedestrians were seen running for cover as flames consumed the facility and nearby palm trees, while others gathered to watch the fire.

In a statement, Deputy Oil Minister Hamid Younis said firefighters managed to control and extinguish the fire caused by the explosions. The top of one of the plant's gas-processing units was blown off, and Younis said technicians were examining the rest of the damage.

A car bomb targeting a shopping area in the town of Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of the capital, killed seven people, including two soldiers, police and hospital officials said. They said 18 people were wounded in the attack, four of whom were soldiers.

Elsewhere in the Baghdad region, three separate bomb attacks targeted commercial areas, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 28 others, police added.

Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.

Including the 29 deaths on Sunday, more than 140 people have been killed since Wednesday in a spate of bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere.

The Islamic State group, know by the acronym ISIS, has also taken credit for demolishing the 2,700-year-old Assyrian Mashki Gate, which was built during the era of the Assyrian King Sennacherib in 705-681 B.C.

Photographs distributed by members of the Islamic State on Sunday show militants using at least one bulldozer to knock down the ancient ruin, although it was unclear when the action took place. National Geographic said in April that it had obtained images revealing the Islamic State's destruction of the Mashki Gate and the nearby Adad Gate, built around 700 B.C.

The group in February 2015 posted a video showing militants using sledgehammers and drills to smash ancient artifacts and statues in Mosul, saying the relics were against the teachings of Islam.

The Mashki Gate was east of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city and the capital of the northern province of Nineveh. Islamic State forces took over Mosul in June 2014 and still control significant areas in northern and western Iraq. The group has declared an Islamic caliphate on the territory it holds in Iraq and in Syria, the former home of an ancient stone temple. Militants destroyed parts of that site in Palmyra last year before Syrian forces backed by Russian troops retook the city.

Iraqi ground forces have also achieved a number of territorial victories against the extremist group, according to Brett McGurk, a presidential envoy to the 66-member anti-Islamic State coalition.

In the past month, the Islamic State has lost key territory along a supply route in Iraq's vast western Anbar province that the extremists had used to ferry fighters and supplies between Iraq and Syria. But after losing territory along the Euphrates River valley, that line has been cut, according to Iraqi and coalition officials.

"This perverse caliphate is shrinking," said McGurk, the Obama administration's diplomatic point man in the international fight against the Islamic State. He told journalists in Jordan on Sunday that the tide is turning against the extremists.

At the height of its power the extremist group was estimated to hold nearly 33 percent of Iraqi territory. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said the Islamic State's hold has since shrunk to 14 percent.

Militants have recently increased their attacks far from the front lines in a campaign that Iraqi officials say is an attempt to distract from their recent battlefield losses.

However, despite Iraq's battlefield successes against the Islamic State, the country's political leadership is in disarray as a deepening political crisis has gridlocked government. Parliament has not met for more than two weeks after supporters of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone. The breach followed repeated delays to al-Sadr's proposed legislation that lawmakers claimed would fight Iraq's entrenched corruption.

"It's possible that some of the political unrest in Baghdad has led (the Islamic State group) to think that they can somehow stir up more chaos than usual," said Nathaniel Rabkin, managing editor of Inside Iraqi Politics, a political risk assessment newsletter.

"ISIS hopes that somehow if they just keep up the pressure, the Iraqi government will at best collapse or at least become incapable of pursuing a cohesive approach" to fighting the extremists , Rabkin said, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State.

While the U.S.-led coalition acknowledges that the planning phase of Iraqi military operations against the Islamic State group has been slowed by political unrest, Rabkin says there is no evidence that the terrorist attacks have had a direct impact on the military campaign against the extremists.

Information for this article was contributed by Sinan Salaheddin, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Murtada Faraj and Maamoun Youssef of The Associated Press, and by Zaid Sabah of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 05/16/2016

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