On Aug 16, 4:52 pm, HOOROO <stargatedecember2...@yahoo.ca> wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html?_r=1&h...

Iraq Toll at 250 in the Deadliest Attack of the War

August 16, 2007

By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Aug. 15 - The toll in a horrific quadruple bombing in an area
of mud and stone houses in the remote northern desert on Tuesday
evening reached at least 250 dead and 350 wounded, several local
officials said Wednesday, making it the deadliest coordinated attack
since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Rescuers and recovery teams were still digging through as many as 200
flattened houses, and the death toll could still rise significantly,
the officials said.

"It is impossible for us to give an exact figure for the dead and
wounded," said Dr. Kifah Kattu, director general of the hospital in
Sinjar, a few miles north of where the explosions occurred. As an
example, he cited one village in the area of the explosions, called Al
Aziz, where he said 40 of the village's simple homes had been
obliterated and no dead or wounded had yet been recovered.

Residents of the area that the attack struck are mostly Kurdish-
speaking, and members of the Yazidi religious sect, which combines
elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions, are predominant.

A farmer who survived one of the explosions, Hasson Dalali, 59, said
in a hospital in Tal Afar, a town 40 miles northeast of the
explosions, that he had lost eight members of his family. "I saw a
flash in the sky; I never saw anything like this before," Mr. Dalali
said.

He said that after two huge explosions threw him to the ground where
he was working his fields, he rushed to his house to check on his
family. "The house was completely flattened to the ground," he said.
"I was looking for any survivor from my family in the rubble. I found
only my 12-year-old nephew."

The nephew had broken ribs and legs and severe wounds to his head, Mr.
Dalali said.

Security officials said that the devastation came when two pairs of
truck bombs exploded about five miles apart in an area close to the
Syrian border in what is known as the Shaam Desert. An official at the
Interior Ministry in Baghdad said that precise information on the
bombings was particularly difficult to obtain because the road between
Sinjar and Tal Afar was partly controlled by extremist Sunni
insurgents, who are suspected in the attack.

The area has long been a focus of insurgent activity, prompting a
major American-led offensive in 2005 intended to clear the area of
insurgents. Nevertheless, last March a twin truck bombing killed 152
people in Tal Afar, and in July, about 155 people died in a single
enormous explosion in the northern town of Amerli.

All three towns lie north of the main areas of the latest American
offensives, supporting the notion that, as in numerous earlier
operations, insurgent cells have flowed away from high troop
concentrations, or affiliated cells have been activated in areas
unaffected by those offensives.

Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the top American military spokesman in Iraq,
said Wednesday that there were improvements in security as a result of
the American troop increase that began in February, but that progress
was "gradual and sometimes it is uneven, just as we see a mosaic of
uneven conditions in Iraq today."

Asked why insurgents would pick such simple villages for such a
colossal attack, General Bergner said: "Perhaps their vulnerability.
Perhaps they were a target that they could attack."

Religious and ethnic minorities have been constant targets of violence
in Iraq. The Amerli bombing, for instance, was aimed at a community of
Shiite Turkmen, who remain in the country in extremely small numbers.

Tension in Yazidi areas has been particularly high since April, when
in an episode captured on video, Yazidis stoned to death a woman of
their own sect for dating a Sunni. After the video appeared on the
Internet, Sunni gunmen stopped minibuses filled with Yazidis and
killed 23.

The mounting death toll came on a day when a meeting on the crisis
arranged by the increasingly isolated prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-
Maliki, again achieved no tangible results. Just days before, Mr.
Maliki hailed the meeting as a major step toward bridging his
country's divisions.

A meeting between Shiite Arab leaders, including Mr. Maliki, and
Kurdish leaders was not attended by the head of the largest Sunni Arab
party, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi. Members of the Sunni party,
said Sadiq al-Rikabi, the political adviser to Mr. Maliki, "haven't
made up their mind yet to join or not to join."

But Mr. Hashemi did express outrage at the bombings in northern Iraq,
which took place on the same day at least 100 gunmen in Iraqi Army
uniforms snatched the deputy oil minister, Abdul Jabar al-Wagaa, and
several colleagues from a protected residential compound in Baghdad.
An Oil Ministry spokesman said Wednesday that there was no new
information on the fate of Mr. Wagaa or the others.

Mr. Hashemi said that both incidents raised questions over "who was
benefiting from such acts," which he said took place "while the
government and its security apparatus remain silent."

The American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, and the top American
commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, issued a joint statement
condemning the bombings. "This indiscriminate and heartless violence
only strengthens our resolve to continue our mission against the
terrorists who are plaguing the people of Iraq," they said.

The two areas that were struck, called Qahtaniya and Jazeera, sit
along a road running southwest from Sinjar through desert and
farmland. Again and again, survivors at nearby hospitals described
gigantic blasts that wiped out whole families and left an apocalyptic
landscape of crumbled mud huts scattered with human remains.

"I am trying to find survivors from the family," said Fawaz Mamdooh, a
lieutenant in the Iraqi police who was on duty at the time and rushed
to the rubble of his house. "I found half the body of my brother, and
his head in another place. I didn't find my wife, my sons or my
parents."

Mahmood Qasim, a civil defense officer who went to the scene, said the
devastation was like nothing he had ever witnessed. "You can only see
remains and wounded people moaning and screaming in pain, and
destroyed houses and rubble everywhere," Mr. Qasim said. "The whole
area is a place of catastrophe."

Stephen Farrell and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed
reporting from Tal Afar, Mosul and Baghdad.

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Er 500 now and maybe more.
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