ISLAMIC STATE (Isis) militants publicly shot dead 36 Sunni al-Bu Nimr tribespeople yesterday, pushing the Iraqi tribe’s death toll in recent days to at least 214.

Senior tribesman Sheik Naim al-Gaoud said that Isis had killed 29 men, four women and three children, lining them up in in the village of Ras al-Maa, north of Ramadi, before shooting them one by one.

The leader warned that 120 families were still trapped there.

“These massacres will be repeated in the coming days unless the government and its security forces help the trapped people,” Mr Gaoud said.

Some Sunnis in Anbar province supported the militants when they seized Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in December, but since Isis’s major offensive in Iraq, a number of Iraq’s Sunni tribes have been fundamental in stalling its advance, taking up arms and fighting alongside Iraqi state security forces.

A US-led campaign of air attacks is also targeting Isis, with nine strikes hitting its fighters on Sunday and yesterday in Beiji, Fallujah and Ar-Rutbah, said US Central Command.

Isis claimed responsibility yesterday for two bombings against Shi’ite pilgrims that left 23 people dead in Baghdad at the weekend.

They boasted that the car bomb attacks had been carried out despite the tight security measures amid the Shi’ites’ “biggest infidel event.”

The two attacks on Sunday targeted Shi’ite pilgrims and the roadside tents serving them on their way to the holy city of Karbala to mark the Ashoura religious holiday.

Another bomb attack struck a group of Shi’ite pilgrims yesterday, killing five and wounding 11 in Baghdad’s south-western suburb of Nahrawan.

And a blast on a commercial street killed three and wounded 11 others in Baghdad’s western district of Amil while, in the western suburbs of Baghdad, a roadside bomb hit an army patrol, killing two soldiers.