Iraq attack’s toll may hit 500

BAGHDAD – Officials said Wednesday that as many as 500 people probably died in a series of coordinated truck bombings that devastated two northern Iraqi villages Tuesday and set a record for mass carnage in war-torn Iraq.

Residents and rescue workers in Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar, two villages near the Syrian border in Nineveh province, spent Wednesday pulling the dead and wounded from the rubble of clay homes that had collapsed when the massive bombs exploded.

The confirmed death toll was at least 250 and climbing, officials said. Five hundred more were wounded, many critically. More than 100 one-story homes and shops were destroyed by the blasts.

Rescue workers set up tents on a highway between the cities of Dohuk and Mosul to house the wounded after health ministry officials said area hospitals were full. The area of devastation in one of the villages measured a half-mile in diameter.

Dr. Ziryan Othman, the minister of health for the Kurdistan region, likened the devastation to a natural disaster.

“What took place in Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar was a vast volcano in humanitarian terms that shook the area,” he said. “Many of the injured are in need of in-depth treatment.”

The expected death toll dwarfs Iraq’s previous deadliest series of bombings, which killed 215 people in Baghdad’s Shiite Muslim enclave of Sadr City on Nov. 23.

It was unclear how the explosions, which struck two villages nearly simultaneously in the early evening, fit into Iraq’s quilt of political and ethnic rivalries.

U.S. officials blamed al-Qaida in Iraq, a Sunni Muslim extremist group that has targeted American troops, Iraqi government forces and Shiite Muslim civilians. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, blamed Sunni extremists. Kurdish officials said the blast was part of the jockeying between Kurds and Arabs for control of northern Iraq, though Nineveh province lies outside the Kurdish autonomous region.

Many, however, said the blast appeared to be the latest spasm in a blood feud that erupted earlier this year when members of Iraq’s non-Muslim Yazidi ethnic minority stoned to death a teenage girl they accused of dating a Sunni Arab man and converting to Islam.

The brutal death of Duaa Khalil Aswad, 17, in April was captured on video by cell phone. Stomach-turning images of her writhing as she was beaten and pelted with stones by hundreds of young Yazidi men spread across the Internet.

Two weeks later, 23 Yazidi men were taken from a bus and executed.