Will Westerners Grieve Islamic State’s Victims in Baghdad?

    An Iraqi woman grieves after a truck bomb hit Karada, a busy shopping district in the center of Baghdad. (Hadi Mizban / AP)

Early Sunday morning, Islamic State exploded a car bomb in a shopping district in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, killing at least 200 people and wounding many dozens more. The attack occurred at the end of the Islamic month of Ramadan. Many of the dead were children.

“It’s unlikely that this attack, just the latest in an unending stream of tragedy to envelop the Iraqi capital, will generate the same panic in the West” as other incidents, Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post wrote.

For years now, we have become almost numb to the violence in Baghdad: Deadly car bombings there conjure up no hashtags, no Facebook profile pictures with the Iraqi flag, and no Western newspaper front pages of the victims’ names and life stories, and they attract only muted global sympathy.

The BBC has a timeline of the recent attacks linked to the Isis in the city and elsewhere in Iraq, including a hideous week of bombings in Baghdad in mid-May:

9 June 2016: At least 30 people killed in and around Baghdad in two suicide attacks claimed by IS

17 May 2016: Four bomb blasts kill 69 people in Baghdad; three of the targets were Shia areas

11 May 2016: Car bombs in Baghdad kill 93 people, including 64 in market in Shia district of Sadr City

1 May 2016: Two car bombs kill at least 33 people in southern city of Samawa

26 March 2016: Suicide attack targets football match in central city of Iskandariya, killing at least 32

6 March 2016: Fuel tanker blown up at checkpoint near central city of Hilla, killing 47

28 February 2016: Twin suicide bomb attacks hit market in Sadr City, killing 70

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.