The deaths happened at a camp housing displaced people in part who have left areas held by ISIS (also known as Daesh), Iraqi authorities in Baghdad said.
A police officer who died in the attack had become suspicious about the attacker and walked up to him to embrace him – apparently as a way of sacrificing himself to minimize the number of casualties – and the attacker detonated the explosives as he did so. That police colonel and another 13 people are now dead, said Councilman Taha Abdul-Ghani, alongside 20 more who are injured, Independent reported.
Mr. Abdul-Ghani says the attack took place at dusk on Sunday as authorities were accommodating families that had fled from the Daesh (also known as ISIL or ISIS)-held town of Qaim.
There was no official claim of responsibility for the attack, though suspicion fell immediately on ISIS. The group has been pushed almost entirely out of Anbar, where the attack took place and Iraqi forces now in the final stages of a major offensive in the northern city of Mosul.