The death toll in massive suicide bombings on Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, CNN reported local officials in Nineveh province as saying on Wednesday. Earlier figures had put the death toll at more than 200.
Four suicide truck bombs ripped through the ancient Yazidi religious sect in northern Iraq in the bloodiest coordinated attacks of the four-year war.
Rescue workers searched frantically for survivors under the rubble of pancaked homes on Wednesday after bombers detonated the four explosive-laden trucks late on Tuesday in two villages inhabited by members of the Yazidi minority.
Embattled Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed extremists for the ”heinous crime”, while the United States military fingered al-Qaeda’s affiliates, who have claimed a string of spectacular attacks in Iraq’s bloody sectarian conflict.
President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, said the victims were ”Kurdish Yazidis” who fell to a ”genocide war launched by the terrorists and takfiris [extremists] against the Iraqi people”.
The attacks struck the villages of al-Qataniyah and al-Adnaniyah, said Dakhil Qassim Hassun, mayor of the Sinjar municipality, and Abdul Rahim al-Shammari, mayor of al-Baaj.
The US military, which was assisting in the clear-up and medical evacuation effort in the remote area, said four car bombs exploded in Qataniyah and a fifth in a residential area of al-Jazeera.
Local clinics struggled to deal with the overwhelming casualties and rescuers continued to search for survivors.
Shammari said about 70 houses were razed by the bombings and that police had imposed curfews in Sinjar and the nearby town of Tal Afar, once held up as a model by US President George Bush but itself no stranger to bloodshed.
Deadly attack
The assault is one of the deadliest global attacks since the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001.
The White House condemned the bombings as ”barbaric attacks on innocent civilians”, and vowed to help Iraqi forces ”beat back these vicious and heartless murderers”, spokesperson Dana Perino said.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband slammed the attacks at ”particularly important and testing times for the Iraqi government” with the national unity coalition in disarray and crisis leadership talks due this week.
Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, a US military spokesperson in Baghdad, fingered al-Qaeda and admitted its network in Iraq had the ”capability to launch such attacks”, suggesting the group wanted to undermine the achievements of the US security push ahead of a key progress report next month.
”It would be likely that al-Qaeda generate spectacular attacks to undermine the sense of progress Iraqis are achieving,” he said.
General David Petraeus, the head of coalition forces in Iraq, is to give a crucial progress report on operations in early September — findings that are likely to have a major impact on Washington’s future war strategy.
Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s National Security Adviser, insisted in Jordan that ”violence has been reduced considerably” since Petraeus began implementing his new counter-insurgency six months ago.
Yazidis, who are estimated to number several hundred thousand worldwide, speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.
They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Qur’anic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.
Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil worshippers.
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.