Toll from Iraq blasts may reach 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. Americans referred to the two villages by their Arabic names, Qahataniya for Tal al-Azizziyah and Adnaniyah for Sheikh Khadar.

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.

"We cannot identify at least 60 bodies for which there is evidence because there's nothing but strips of flesh as a result of the strength of the blast," said Dakhil Qassim, the mayor of the Sinjar district, where the two towns are located. "I do not expect the rescue teams to finish their search for bodies today."

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.

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 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 Doaa Khalil Aswad, 17, in April was captured on video by cellphone. 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.

There may be as many as 350,000 Yazidis in Iraq, but the count is uncertain in part because Yazidis are secretive about their religion. Their religion's origin traces back to ancient Persian practices but includes aspects of Islam, though in ways that have made the sect anathema to Sunni and Shiite traditions.

Yazidis believe, for example, that God first created seven angellike beings, who then created Adam. The seven occasionally return to Earth in reincarnated form, Yazidis believe. The central focus of their worship is the angel Malak Taus, represented by a peacock.

Sinjar Mayor Qassim said that for months after Aswad's killing, the villages have been bombarded with fliers from the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida front organization, telling the Yazidis to leave.

The carnage dealt a serious blow to the Bush administration's hopes of presenting a positive picture in a progress report on Iraq to be delivered by the top U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker in about four weeks.

"It's an area that is very, very remote — quite small villages out there — and it was disheartening for us, too, obviously," Petraeus told The Associated Press in an interview.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.