August 15, 2007

Quadruple Suicide Bombings Kill 250 In Northern Iraq

UPDATED.

Iraqi officials now say at least 250 people have been killed and 300 to 350 wounded in the deadliest attack in a single area of Iraq since the war began four years ago. U.S. troops were dispatched late yesterday to help move the wounded to hospitals and assist in digging through the rubble. Local officials expect the death toll to mount as rescue workers their efforts.

The carnage comes after several suicide truck bombs yesterday ripped through the Kurdish towns of Qahataniya and Jazeera, west of Mosul in northern Iraq. U.S. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon told CNN today that the attacks were a "trademark al-Qaida event."

Qahataniya is home to members of an ancient religious sect called Yazidi, which pulls in aspects of several different world religions and worships an angel figure that some groups believe is the devil. They are ethnic Kurds, although their allegiances were a subject of dispute during Saddam Hussein's regime.

"This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will -- almost genocide when you consider the fact the target they attacked and the fact that these Yazidis, out in a very remote part of Nineveh province, where there is very little security and really no security required to this point," Mixon said. He told CNN that members of the religious sect had recently received threatening letters telling them "to leave because they are infidels."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino yesterday condemned the attacks as "barbaric."

"Extremists continue to show to what lengths they will go to stop Iraq from becoming a stable and secure country," she said from the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas.

The Yazidis have been friendly to U.S. troops, but the small sect -- made up of only about half a million people located in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran and other nearby countries -- had gone largely unnoticed for most of the conflict. That changed in April of this year, when relatives of a teenage Yazidi girl stoned her to death for converting to Islam and running away with a Muslim boyfriend. An unconfirmed video of the incident was posted on the Internet, inflaming tensions between the sect and Sunni Muslims.

Apparently in retaliation, gunmen kidnapped 21 Yazidi men from a bus and executed them near Mosul on April 22. "Recent attacks on Yazidis have been blamed on al-Qaida-linked Sunni insurgents seeking revenge," National Public Radio reports.

NPR's "Morning Edition" has more background on the sect, and the Los Angeles Times and New York Times have more on this story.

Posted at 1:55 PM
Posted to: Iraq, Kurds, Middle East
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