Death toll in bombing of sect rises

The death toll from five synchronized suicide bombings in a remote northern border area rose above 250 on Wednesday, making the attack on the reclusive Yazidi religious sect the deadliest act of terrorism in Iraq since the war began more than four years ago.

Rescuers, police and grieving townspeople pulled scores of bodies from the rubble of three villages destroyed Tuesday night by the blasts in Nineveh province. The attack occurred in an impoverished, backward region where Yazidis have taken refuge from hostile neighbors who consider them heretics or devil worshipers.

The blasts injured at least 350 people and pulverized about 400 mud-walled homes, burying victims and body parts in a gruesome landscape of gore and charred debris, local officials reported.

As the scope of the slaughter became apparent amid the desperate rescue operations, Ziryan Othman, health minister from the neighboring Kurdistan region, said the number killed exceeded 250 and could grow higher as the collapsed houses and shops probably had entombed many inhabitants. The death toll surpassed the 215 killed in November by suicide bombings in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, the previous high-water mark of wartime horror.

Iraqi and U.S. officials immediately blamed Al Qaeda- affiliated insurgents for the devastation Tuesday near the Syrian border, saying the scale and sophistication of the coordinated detonations of gas tankers bore the hallmarks of the militant group’s followers.

Survivors described scenes of panic after the blasts in Qahtaniya, Tal Uzair and Jazeera leveled the villages’ warrens of crude earthen homes and shops.

“The roofs fell on our heads,” said Murad Samku, a 30-year-old farmer being treated for contusions at a hospital in nearby Sinjar but desperate to get back to the disaster scene to search for his family.

“What I saw last night in the darkness was a horrible image of my beloved village. The land is deserted now. There’s nothing left.”

The region’s limited medical facilities were overrun by maimed, wailing throngs. Many of the victims suffered multiple broken bones or had severed limbs.

“Most of these cases are in critical condition, and we are suffering from a lack of medicine and medical staff,” said Kifah Mohammed, a doctor at the overwhelmed Sinjar hospital, the closest to the disaster.

U.S. and other coalition military forces shuttled the injured to other hospitals for treatment, said Mohammed, who, like others in the region, insisted that the death toll could double to 500 or more once the flattened villages were fully explored.

Doctors appealed for urgent deliveries of painkillers, bandages, syringes and other medical supplies, a United Nations relief agency reported.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, struggling to survive the defection of nearly half his Cabinet in part as a protest over sectarian violence, condemned the bombings as a “heinous crime” carried out by the enemies of Iraqi unity.

President Jalal Talabani called the attacks on fellow Kurds “a genocidal war launched by terrorists and extremists.”

U.S. military officials blamed militants they have linked with Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for the “tough day” experienced by Iraqis.

“The car bombs that were used all had the consistent profile of Al Qaeda in Iraq violence,” said Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, adding that the group’s signature was evident in its “complete disregard for human life.”

But the Yazidis, an ancient community that is neither Islamic nor Christian and holds divine an archangel that some Muslims contend is Satan, have suffered persecution and conflict with other religions through the ages.

Yazidis contended that they were targeted because of their isolation and vulnerability.

“We are considered the weakest among the Kurds and the easy target,” said Nassr Haji, a Yazidi journalist from Sinjar. “Don’t forget that this area is connected with Al Anbar province, which is infested with terrorists and saboteurs. This area was the easiest to get to so that those backward people could express their hatred for Kurds.”

A curfew was imposed throughout the Yazidi region, about 70 miles west of Mosul, with only police and emergency vehicles allowed to move among the smoldering rubble already rife with the smell of decomposing remains.

Anguished relatives were combing the ruins of their homes for limbs or other body parts and taking them to hospitals and morgues in hopes of identifying their lost loved ones, said a doctor at the hospital in Dahuk, where the overflow from Qahtaniya was being diverted.

“Some experts have come from Baghdad to help us determine which body parts belong to which bodies,” Col. Ahmed Salem of the Qahtaniya police force told the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “At least 40 patients are in a critical situation and, according to doctors, could die at any moment.”

Yazidi leaders accused extremist Muslims of waging genocide against the sect. The three shattered villages were refugee settlements of about 35,000 residents each established after the regime of Saddam Hussein drove Yazidis from Arab-dominated regions of northern Iraq in 1975, said Waad Hamad Mattu, head of the Yazidi Movement for Reform and Progress, which has a sole representative in the Iraqi parliament.

“We cannot precisely identify the attackers at the moment, but I expect those cockroaches will publish a statement on the Internet about their attack,” Mattu said.

The horrendous bloodletting stood as a graphic challenge to the claims of U.S.-led forces here that they have been making progress in defeating an insurgency that has killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis since the war began.

Bergner, the military spokesman, said a stepped-up offensive launched this week had killed or captured dozens of top insurgents but acknowledged that the attack Tuesday showed “we still have a great deal of work to do against Al Qaeda in Iraq” and other militants.

Also Wednesday, U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a strike against insurgent sanctuaries in Baghdad aimed at capturing bomb builders and militant strategists.

At least seven civilians were killed in Baghdad, and 15 bodies were found in the morning, presumed victims of death squads.

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carol.williams@latimes.com

Special correspondent Ruaa Al-Zarary in Mosul and Times staff writers Saif Hameed and Wail Alhafith in Baghdad contributed to this report.