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MOSUL, Iraq : More than 200 people were killed when four suicide truck bombs targeted the ancient Yazidi religious sect in northern Iraq amid growing fears Wednesday that more dead were trapped under the rubble.
In one of the bloodiest single incidents of the four-year war in Iraq, bombers detonated four explosive-laden trucks in two villages in the province of Nineveh inhabited by members of Iraq's Yazidi minority late Tuesday.
The attacks in the villages of Al-Khataniyah and Al-Adnaniyah killed more than 200 people and wounded another 200, said Dakhil Qassim Hassun, mayor of the Sinjar municipality.
Victims were ferried to hospitals across northern Iraq as local clinics struggled to deal with the overwhelming number of dead and wounded, with rescue workers to continue searching for survivors in the rubble of pancaked homes.
"The casualties are expected to rise as many victims are still trapped under the debris," Hassun told AFP by telephone.
The White House swiftly condemned the bombings as "barbaric attacks on innocent civilians," and vowed to help Iraqi forces "beat back these vicious and heartless murderers," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
The US military gave a lower death toll of 60 but said five car bombs had exploded in the region.
"Four vehicles were reported to have entered a crowded bus station and exploded as soon as they were inside of Khataniyah... killing approximately 30 people," the military said in a statement on Wednesday.
It said another car bomb exploded in a residential area of al-Jazeera, southwest of Khataniyah and also killed another 30 people.
US forces also said an unknown number of people were trapped under the debris and up to 20 houses were destroyed.
Yazidis -- who number some 500,000 -- 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 Koranic 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.
On April 7, a mob of Yazidi men stoned to death Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old girl from their own people who had offended conservative local values by running away to marry a young Muslim man.
The savage murder was captured on cellphone videos and widely distributed, and Sunni extremists were quick to stage what they described as revenge attacks, but which resembled the insurgent killings elsewhere in Iraq.
On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers home to the dead girl's community, the village of Beshika 10 kilometres (six miles) outside Mosul, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead.
In Baghdad on Tuesday, gunmen dressed as local security forces stormed into a heavily guarded state compound to kidnap the deputy oil minister in the highest profile abduction in Iraq for months.
Abdel Jabar al-Wagaa was dragged out of the compound of the state oil marketing company at gunpoint with several other people in broad daylight, oil ministry officials said.
"It was a criminal gang; they have no political or sectarian motives," Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani told state television.
It was the highest profile kidnapping in Baghdad since five Britons were snatched from the Iraqi finance ministry when men wearing police uniforms stormed the building on May 29. The Britons have still not been released.
Also 10 more American soldiers were reported killed on Tuesday, including five when their helicopter crashed in the western province of Al-Anbar.
The attacks came on the second day of the latest major US operation against Shiite extremist networks and insurgents linked to Al-Qaeda.
The nationwide crackdown has been seen as an attempt to curb violence before General David Petraeus, the head of coalition forces in Iraq, gives a crucial progress report on operations in Iraq in early September.
Given daily sectarian violence and political paralysis, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has called for crisis talks this week of senior leaders from Iraq's bitterly divided communities to try to salvage his crumbling coalition.
- AFP/de/ir
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