175 Iraqis slaughtered by four suicide truck bombs
IRAQ: At least 175 people were slaughtered and more than 200 wounded
on Tuesday when four suicide truck bombs targeted members of the ancient
Yazidi religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.
The brutal attacks came just hours after gunmen dressed in local
security uniforms kidnapped Iraq’s Deputy Oil Minister Abdel Jabar al-Wagga
in a brazen daylight raid on a well-protected Baghdad compound.
In one of the bloodiest single incidents of the four-year-old war in
Iraq, bombers detonated four explosive-laden trucks in two villages in
the northern province of Nineveh inhabited by members of Iraq’s Yazidi
minority.
The attacks in the villages of Al-Khataniyah and Al-Adnaniyah killed
at least 175 people and wounded more than 200, according to both Iraqi
army spokesman Captain Mohammed al-Obeidi and Dakhil Qassim Hassun,
mayor of the Sinjar municipality.
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.
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.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, 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.
The kidnapping itself came hours after a suicide truck bomber
shattered a concrete bridge linking Baghdad to the north, killing eight
people and sending three cars plunging into the river below, security
officials said.
Also 10 more American soldiers were reported killed, 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.
A CH-47 Chinook crashed near the Al-Taqaddum air base in Al-Anbar
province while on a routine post-maintenance check, killing five
American servicemen, the military said, adding five more soldiers died
in other attacks.
Nearly two dozen Iraqis were also killed on Tuesday in other attacks.
Baghdad, Wednesday, AFP
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