ISIS kills 14 Real Madrid fans near Baghdad, calls football 'un-Islamic'
Baghdad: ISIS terrorists shot dead at least 14 Real Madrid fans in a café in Balad, north of Baghdad on Friday.
According to the Daily Mail, three terrorists armed with AK-47s stormed the café and opened fire at the fans who had gathered to watch old recordings of the Spanish football club.
President of the Madrid supporters club, Ziad Subhan, said to the Daily Mail, “A group of Islamic terrorists, from ISIS, came into the café, armed with AK-47s, shooting at random at everyone who was inside”. He claimed that Islamic State (IS) terrorists did this because they felt that football was un-Islamic.
Javier Tebas Medrano, president of La Liga, said, “Dismayed by the attack against a sentence of Real Madrid [fans] in Iraq. Terrorism attacks the football. We are with the victims and their families.”
ISIS said the attack was the latest in a campaign to ‘honour’ Abdel Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, the group's second-in-command, who was killed in a coalition strike in March.
Video: ISIS suicide bomber blows himself up at a stadium in Baghdad
A Reuters witness saw the scorched body of a suspected assailant hanging upside down from a post outside the cafe on Friday morning. Residents said they had seized the man from a nearby house where he had fled following the attack. They said they had burned him alive after he confessed to the attack. An intelligence official confirmed this account.
Friday's attackers had passed three police checkpoints before reaching their target, said police sources to Reuters. Security forces have been deployed throughout the town, fearing more attacks.
A 22-year-old victim named Tahseen told a doctor he had been smoking a water pipe when a man wearing civilian clothes and a bandolier filled with ammunition crossed the street toward al-Furat Cafe. He recounted hearing several blasts, likely from stun bombs, amid gunfire that lasted about ten minutes.
Inside the cafe hung pictures of famous footballers and a sign for a local group of Real Madrid fans. Witnesses said there was no match on Thursday night but spectators often congregated there. Real
"Football and sport shall always be spaces in which to come together and in which harmony and peace reign and with which no form of barbaric terrorism will be able to compete," it said in an online statement.
A suicide bombing in March at a youth soccer match south of
