Yazidis fear annihilation after Iraq bombings

By Peter Graff

KAHTANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Angry members of a minority sect in Iraq said on Thursday they feared annihilation after scores were killed in possibly the worst suicide bomb attack of the four-year conflict.

Frail clay houses in the centre of Kahtaniya, one of two villages targeted on Tuesday by garbage trucks packed with explosives, were flattened for several blocks.

Chunks of concrete and twisted aluminum lay in the street beside the destroyed homes of hundreds of Yazidis, a minority sect regarded by Sunni militants as infidels.

Estimates of the death toll varied from 175 to 500.

"Their aim is to annihilate us, to create trouble and kill all the Yazidis because we are not Muslims," said Abu Saeed, a grey-bearded old man in Kahtaniya.

Saeed told Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, who made a short tour of the devastated area, that 51 members of his extended family had been killed. About 100 angry Yazidi men gathered as Salih met local officials.

"It's like a nuclear site, the site of a nuclear bomb," Salih, a Kurd, told Reuters.

The U.S. military has said al Qaeda is the prime suspect for the bombings. It had said large-scale attacks were possible before a progress report on the conflict is delivered to Congress on September 15.

U.S. forces this week began a new nationwide security push, including operations north and south of Baghdad, targeting Sunni Islamist al Qaeda militants and Shi'ite militias.

The U.S. military said on Thursday two soldiers had been killed and six wounded in combat north of the capital on Wednesday. A total of 3,701 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

U.S. President George W. Bush, under pressure to show results in the unpopular war, has said August could be a bloody month as troops move out of bases into smaller outposts and as al Qaeda attempts to influence debate in Washington.

"NO MORE YAZIDIS"

"Al Qaeda wants to kill all the Yazidis," said another Kahtaniya villager, who gave his name only as Hossein. "Another bomb like this and there will be no more Yazidis left."

Yazidis are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect of several hundred thousand in northern Iraq and Syria who say they are persecuted for their beliefs.

In April, gunmen killed 23 Yazidi factory workers in Mosul in apparent retaliation for the stoning several weeks earlier of a teenaged Yazidi girl who police said had fallen in love with a Sunni Arab man and converted to Islam.