Bombings signal rising threat for Iraq's ethnic minorities

The US blamed Al Qaeda in Iraq for Tuesday's coordinated suicide bombings that may have killed as many as 400 Yazidis in the worst attack of its kind since the war began.

By Sam Dagher | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 17, 2007 edition

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Baghdad - As the possibility that the death toll from Tuesday's bombings against Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking sect in northwestern Iraq, might top 400, rescue efforts continued in the Sinjar area northwest of Mosul.

The bombings are likely to constitute the single deadliest attack of the war – an act that drives home the plight of minority groups that, ethnic minority leaders charge, are facing possible genocide.

"The rescue efforts are still ongoing. There are bodies under the rubble. So far, we have at least 400 people killed," says Brig. Gen. Abdel-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

A spokesman for US forces in northern Iraq confirmed that coalition troops, along with Iraqi security forces and villagers, were still looking for the dead and wounded. He gave a death toll of 175 to 200.

"It's very early, the recovery is still under way," said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly of Task Force Lightning in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Province.

Gov. Duraid Kashmula, who had surveyed the devastated area Thursday in the company of Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd, put the toll at 220 dead and 390 wounded so far.

The disparities may result from the fact that the dead and wounded were taken to at least six different hospitals in Nineveh and the neighboring semiautonomous Kurdish region, which declared Thursday as a day of mourning.

The attacks involved four trucks packed with between two to five tons of explosives, according to Iraqi officials, and leveled entire sections of the villages of Qahtaniyah, Al-Jazeera, and Tal Uzair in the Sinjar area northwest of Mosul and about 20 miles from Syria.

"More than half of our village has been destroyed, and the rest of the homes are not suitable," said an elderly man on local television, standing amid the devastation of Qahtaniyah, which looked more like the aftermath of an earthquake. "Families are now wandering in the wilderness. We ask the central government for help and compensation."

The strike occurred in one of the most remote and most impoverished parts of the country and targeted an insular ancient community that was battling for survival in an increasingly hostile land. Most were sheepherders or made pickles and arrack, a local alcoholic drink.

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