Deadliest Attack Yet Claims 250 Lives in Iraq

BAGHDAD -- Rescuers used bare hands and shovels today to claw through clay houses shattered by an onslaught of suicide bombings that killed at least 250 and possibly as many as 500 members of an ancient religious sect in the deadliest attack of the Iraq war.

The victims of the war's second-deadliest attack were members of a small Kurdish sect, the Yazidis, who have been the target of Muslim extremists who consider them infidels.

"This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will, almost genocide, when you consider the fact of the target they attacked, and the fact that these Yazidis are really out in a very remote part of Ninevah province where they're, there is very little security, and really no security required up until this point," the commander of American forces in northern Iraq, Army Major General Benjamin Mixon, told CNN.

Mr. Mixon said last month that he proposed reducing American troop levels in Ninevah and predicted the province would shift to Iraqi government control as early as this month. It was unclear whether that projection would hold after yesterday's staggering death tolls.

Police said separately that five people were killed in an ambush today on a minibus carrying civilians near Khalis, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, where suspected Al Qaeda militants had set up a fake checkpoint. A 5-year-old was among the dead.

In the main northern city of Mosul, a bomb in a parked car killed a civilian and wounded ten others, police and army officers said. A police patrol appeared to have been the target.

South of Baghdad, meanwhile, a suicide car bomber killed two people and wounded seven, Iraqi police said.

Yesterday's four suicide truck bombers struck nearly simultaneously, killing more people than any other concerted attack since November 23, when 215 people were killed by mortar fire and five car bombs in Baghdad's Shiite Muslim enclave of Sadr City.

Some 300 people were wounded in the attacks on the Yazidis, an ancient religious community, said Dakhil Qassim, the mayor of the nearby town of Sinjar.

The carnage dealt a serious blow to American efforts to pacify the country with just weeks before top American commander General David Petraeus and American Ambassador Ryan Crocker are to deliver a pivotal report to Congress amid a fierce debate over whether to begin withdrawing American troops from Iraq.

American officials believe extremists are attempting to regroup across northern Iraq after being driven from strongholds in and around Baghdad, and commanders have warned they expected Sunni insurgents to step up attacks in a bid to upstage the report.

Mr. Qassim said the four trucks approached the town of Qahataniya, 75 miles west of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, from dirt roads and all exploded within minutes of each other. He said the casualty toll was expected to rise.

"We are still digging with our hands and shovels because we can't use cranes because many of the houses were built of clay," Mr. Qassim said. "We are expecting to reach the final death toll tomorrow or day after tomorrow as we are getting only pieces of bodies."

"The car bombs that were used all had the consistent profile of Al Qaeda in Iraq violence," an American military spokesman, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, told reporters in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

The American military issued a statement putting the death toll in the Qahataniya bombings at 60. The Iraqi estimate of more than 200 deaths was based on body counts from local hospitals and morgues to which American officials had no access.

Prime Minister al-Maliki issued a statement blaming the bombings on "terrorism powers who seek to fuel sectarian strife and damage our people's national unity."

The Yazidis are a primarily Kurdish religious sect with ancient roots that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians. Yazidis, who don't believe in hell or evil, deny that.

The Islamic State in Iraq, an Al Qaeda front group, distributed leaflets a week ago warning residents near the scene of yesterday's bombings that an attack was imminent because Yazidis are "anti-Islamic."

The sect has been under fire since some members stoned a Yazidi teenager to death in April. She had converted to Islam and fled her family with a Muslim boyfriend, and police said 18-year-old Duaa Khalil Aswad was killed by relatives who disapproved of the match.

A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the woman's killing was later posted on Iraqi Web sites. Its authenticity could not be independently verified, but recent attacks on Yazidis have been blamed on Al Qaeda-linked Sunni insurgents seeking revenge.

A curfew was in place today across towns west of Mosul, and American and Iraqi forces were conducting house-to-house searches in response to the bombings, according to Iraqi police and Army officers who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns. Twenty suspects were arrested, they said.

Meanwhile, American troops killed 11 suspected terrorists and detained four others in operations against Al Qaeda in central and northern Iraq, the military said in a statement.

Ten thousand American troops and 6,000 Iraqi soldiers are involved in air and ground assaults across Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, both north of Baghdad, in a nationwide offensive against Sunni insurgents with links to Al Qaeda and Shiite militiamen.

More than 300 artillery rounds, rockets, and bombs were dropped in the Diyala River valley late Monday and early yesterday, and three suspected Al Qaeda gunmen were killed and eight were taken prisoner, the military said. American troops also discovered several roadside bombs rigged to explode.