Iraq reels from bloody attack
2007-08-15 11:01
Mosul - More than 200 people were slaughtered when four suicide truck bombs targeted the ancient Yazidi religious sect in northern Iraq amid growing fears on Wednesday that more dead were trapped under the rubble.
In one of the bloodiest single incidents of the four-year war in Iraq, bombers late on Tuesday detonated four explosive-laden trucks in two villages in the province of Nineveh inhabited by members of the Yazidi minority.
The attacks in the villages of Al-Qataniyah and Al-Adnaniyah killed more than 200 people and wounded another 200, said Dakhil Qassim Hassun, mayor of the Sinjar municipality and Abdul Rahim al-Shammari, mayor of Al-Baaj municipality.
Victims were ferried to hospitals across northern Iraq as local clinics struggled to deal with the overwhelming number of dead and wounded, with rescue workers continuing to search for survivors in the rubble of pancaked homes.
"The casualties are expected to rise as many victims are still trapped under the debris," Hassun told AFP by telephone.
Shammari said about 70 houses were razed by the bombings and police had imposed curfew in Sinjar and the nearby town of Tal Afar.
"Scores of people are flocking to donate blood to save the wounded who are admitted in seven hospitals in Nineveh and Dohuk provinces," he said.
Yazidis brought into sectarian violence
Yazidis - who number some 500 000 - speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.
The community has attempted to remain aloof from the vicious sectarian and political conflicts gripping much of the rest of Iraq, but in recent months relations with nearby Sunni Muslim communities have worsened dramatically.
On April 7, a mob of Yazidi men stoned to death Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old girl from their own people who had offended conservative local values by running away to marry a young Muslim man.
The savage murder was captured on cellphone videos and widely distributed, and Sunni extremists were quick to stage what they described as revenge attacks, but which resembled the insurgent killings elsewhere in Iraq.
On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers home to the dead girl's village of Beshika outside Mosul, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead.
- AFP