Al-Qaeda suspected of bombings

2007-08-15 20:52

Baghdad - The US military said on Wednesday al-Qaeda was the "prime suspect" in suicide bomb attacks on a minority sect that Iraqi officials said killed 200 people in northwest Iraq.

Television pictures showed badly burned and screaming survivors, many of them children, in hospital.

Rescue workers searched for bodies in the rubble of dozens of clay houses destroyed in up to five simultaneous car bombings overnight.

The attackers, driving fuel tankers, struck densely populated residential areas west of the city of Mosul that are home to members of the Yazidi sect, whose followers are considered infidels by Sunni Islamist militant groups.

The US military said it was too early to say who was responsible, but the scale and apparently co-ordinated nature of the bombings were hallmarks of Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.

"We're looking at al-Qaeda as the prime suspect," said US Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver.

The mayor of the district of Sinjar, Dakheel Qassim Hasoun, said 200 people had been killed. The remoteness of the area made it difficult to establish details of the attacks or the number of casualties.

The death toll appeared to be the highest in any one attack since November, when six car bombs in different parts of Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City district killed 200 people and wounded 250.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) condemned "the cowardly and barbaric attack against innocent civilians of this tolerant religious minority".

The US military has launched a major new offensive in Iraq in a bid to thwart such attacks by al-Qaeda and Shi'ite militias ahead of a progress report on the US military strategy in Iraq that is due to be presented to the US Congress in September.

"This indiscriminate and heartless violence only strengthens our resolve to continue our mission against the terrorists who are plaguing the people of Iraq," US ambassador Ryan Crocker and military commander General David Petraeus.

In the aftermath of the blast, authorities imposed a total curfew in the Sinjar area, which is close to the Syrian border.

Mayor Hasoun said only people and vehicles involved in rescue efforts would be allowed to move through the area.

Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Donnelly, US military spokesperson for northern Iraq, said US forces were assisting Iraqi emergency agencies as they sifted through the rubble.

Iraqi authorities said the death toll was so high because most of the destroyed houses, tightly packed in three Yazidi residential compounds, were made of clay that shattered with the force of the blasts.

The US military said five vehicle-borne bombs had been detonated in Yazidi residential compounds in the villages of Kahtaniya and al-Jazeera. Jaad said the village of Tal Uzair was also hit.

Residents said all the victims appeared to be Yazidis.

Yazidis are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect who live in northern Iraq and Syria. Sunni militants have kidnapped and killed many in recent months.

- Reuters