250 bodies recovered in Iraq.. Yezidi massacre

[General Duke]

Search goes on as Iraq death toll tops 250

 

 

Michael Howard in Sulaymaniya

Wednesday August 15, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

 

Men dig through rubble to search for survivors and dead on after coordinated suicide attacks in the town late of Qahataniya, 75 miles west of Mosul. Photograph: Mohammed Ibrahim/AP

 

 

 

They dug through the muddy remains of their homes today with any implement they could find, even their own hands, but the final death toll from yesterday's devastating suicide truck bomb attacks on Yezidi Kurds in north-western Iraq may still not be known until Friday.

At least 250 bodies had been uncovered by last night, said Zayan Othman, the health minister of the nearby autonomous Kurdish region, which would make it the deadliest attack since the war began, surpassing the 215 killed by mortar fire and five car bombs in Baghdad's Shia enclave of Sadr City, on November 23 last year.

 

Dakil Qassim Hassoon, the mayor of Sinjar who was helping coordinate the grim search in Tel Uzeir and Sibi Sheikh Khidr, the two sub-districts of Sinjar that bore the brunt of the coordinated blasts, told the Guardian by phone: "We are still digging with our hands and shovels because we can't use cranes because many of the houses were built of clay."

 

"Over 100 houses were completely flattened." The mayor said one local policeman had eight family members missing.

 

"Everyone is helping, young and old, women and men, but we are getting only pieces of bodies," he said. "We are expecting to reach the final death toll today or tomorrow."

 

As the search continued, the US military hospital in Mosul and the general hospital in the Kurdish-controlled city of Dohuk, to the north, struggled to treat more than 350 people who had been wounded, some of them severely.

 

Television footage showed an emergency room in Dohuk overwhelmed with patients. A nurse wiped blood from the face of a young boy, who cried in pain, while another wound bandages around the head and arms of an infant who showed signs of severe bruising around the eyes.

 

Kurdish authorities in Irbil said they planned to send food parcels for about 5,000 people estimated to have been made homeless by the blasts. The governor of Nineveh province, who visited the scene today, promised tents.

 

Meanwhile, towns in the region west of Mosul were in the grip of a curfew, and US and Iraqi troops conducted house-to-house searches in a number of Sunni Arab villages close to the Yezidi settlements where the blasts had occurred. Military sources said 20 suspects had been detained.

 

US officials said the attack bore the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda. "The car bombs that were used all had the consistent profile of al-Qaida in Iraq violence," Brigadier General Kevin Bergner told reporters in Baghdad. "We're continuing to investigate, and we'll learn more in the coming days."

 

US commanders said Mosul and its western environs had recently attracted Sunni militants who have pushed north from strongholds in and around Baghdad, as well as the renewed US surge in the restive provinces of Anbar and Diyala.

 

Only recently, the US army's senior officer in northern Iraq, Major General Benjamin Mixon, had predicted that Nineveh province could transfer to Iraqi control as early as this month.

 

But Yezidi leaders said they feared a withdrawal of US forces would leave them at the mercy of the militants. Mayor Hassoon told the Guardian he had received intelligence reports prior to the attack that extremists were planning an attack on the town of Sinjar itself.

 

"We introduced tight security measures, and the terrorists may well have changed to a softer target," he said.

 

 

Iraq's Yezidis, numbering several hundred thousand, are also concentrated east of Mosul, on the borders of the more tranquil Kurdistan region. But those who live to the west, astride the Iraqi-Syrian border have had it much tougher.

 

Sibi Sheikh Khidr, one of the places hit yesterday, was a "collective town" into which were herded Yezidis who had been uprooted from their traditional communities during sweeps by the Ba'athist regime in the 1980s and 1990s. It is surrounded by largely hostile Sunni Arab lands.

 

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki issued a statement blaming the bombings on "terrorism powers who seek to fuel sectarian strife and damage our people's national unity".

 

A joint statement by the senior US military commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, and the US Ambassador, Ryan Crocker, described the actions as "barbaric".

 

The Arab League said that "the best way out of this circle of violence is to go ahead with steady steps toward national reconciliation". It was a prod to the leaders of Iraq's bitterly divided ethnic and sectarian groups who are hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad where they are preparing for a "crisis summit," to break the political deadlock and draw Sunni Arabs back into the national unity government.

 

 

Several Yezidi Kurds who spoke to the Guardian today said they believed they were deliberately targeted because of their religion. Sunni Muslim extremists consider them infidels for their veneration of the Malek Taous, or the Peacock King, which some Muslims and Christians erroneously equate with devil worship.

 

"They have been threatening us for a long time, and they have been preventing food and fuel reaching our communities by stopping trucks on the roads from Mosul," said Jassim Shengali, a local official.

 

Others said they were being punished for "being Kurds" and for wanting to join the Kurdistan federal region in a referendum that Iraq's constitution says must take place by the end of the year