Four suicide bombings kill 175 in Iraq

MOSUL, 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, said " Oil Minister Hussein.

The Bush administration denounced the bombings as "barbaric attacks on innocent civilians," White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino expressed sympathy to the families of those killed or wounded.

There was no claim of responsibility, but the attack bore the hallmark of al-Qaida in Iraq, which has been regrouping in the north after being driven from safe havens in Anbar and Diyala provinces.

"This is a terrorist act and the people targeted are poor Yazidis who have nothing to do with the armed conflict," said Dhakil Qassim, mayor in the town of Sinjar near the attacks who blamed al-Qaida in Iraq.