BAGHDAD, Aug 15: Rescuers dug through the muddy wreckage of collapsed clay houses in northwest Iraq on Wednesday, uncovering at least 250 bodies from suicide truck bombings, making it the deadliest attack since the war began.
The victims of the war’s second-deadliest attack, which the US blamed on Al Qaida, were members of the Yazidis, a small Kurdish sect.
Four suicide truck bombers struck nearly simultaneously on Tuesday, causing buildings to crumble and trapping entire families underneath the wreckage.
Zayan Othman, the health minister of the nearby autonomous Kurdish region, said the casualty toll had risen to at least 250 killed and 350 wounded as bodies were pulled from the rubble. That surpassed the previous deadliest attack of the war when 215 people were killed by mortar fire and five car bombs in Baghdad’s Sadr City on Nov 23.
US officials believe extremists are attempting to regroup across northern Iraq after being driven from strongholds in and around Baghdad, and commanders have warned they expected insurgents to step up attacks in a bid to upstage the report.
“This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will, almost genocide, when you consider the fact of the target they attacked, and the fact that these Yazidis are really out in a very remote part of Ninevah province where they’re, there is very little security, and really no security required up until this point,” Maj-Gen Benjamin Mixon, the commander of US forces in northern Iraq, told CNN.
Police said separately that five people were killed in an ambush on Wednesday on a minibus carrying civilians near Khalis, about 80km north of Baghdad, where suspected Al Qaeda militants had set up a fake checkpoint. A 5-year-old was among the dead.
In Mosul, a bomb in a parked car killed a civilian and wounded 10 others, police and army officers said. A police patrol appeared to have been the target.
In south of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber killed two people and wounded seven others, Iraqi police said.
The carnage dealt a serious blow to US efforts to pacify the country with just weeks before top US commander Gen David Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker are to deliver a pivotal report to Congress amid a fierce debate over whether to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq.
Dakhil Qassim, the mayor of the nearby town of Sinjar, said the four trucks approached the town of Qahataniya, 120km west of Mosul, from dirt roads and all exploded within minutes of each other. He said the casualty toll was expected to rise.
“We are still digging with our hands and shovels because we can’t use cranes because many of the houses were built of clay,” Qassim said. “We are expecting to reach the final death toll tomorrow or day after tomorrow as we are getting only pieces of bodies.”
“The car bombs that were used all had the consistent profile of Al Qaida in Iraq violence,” US military spokesman Brig-Gen Kevin Bergner told reporters in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.
The US military issued a statement putting the death toll in the Qahataniya bombings at 60. The Iraqi estimate was based on body counts from local hospitals and morgues to which US officials had no access.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a statement blaming the bombings on “terrorism powers who seek to fuel sectarian strife and damage our people’s national unity”.—AP
