The blogs noted the suspicious circumstances, and Sy Hersh alerted us to the Israeli presence years ago.
So it is Mossad that carried out this barbaric and dastardly act!
"Toll rises to 250 in Iraq bombings; Attack on sect deadliest since start of war" by Carol J. Williams/Los Angeles Times August 16, 2007
BAGHDAD -- The death toll from five synchronized suicide bombings in a remote northern border area rose above 250 yesterday, making the attack on the reclusive Yazidi religious sect the deadliest single act of terrorism in Iraq since the war began more than four years ago.
Rescuers, police, and townspeople pulled scores of bodies from the rubble of three villages destroyed by the Tuesday night blasts in Nineveh Province.... The blasts injured at least 350 others and pulverized about 400 mud-walled homes, burying victims and body parts in a landscape of gore and charred debris.
As the scope of the slaughter became apparent amid desperate rescue operations, Zayan Othman, health minister from the neighboring Kurdistan region, said the number killed exceeded 250 and could grow higher as the collapsed houses and shops likely had entombed many inhabitants.
Iraqi and US officials immediately blamed Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents... claiming the scale and sophistication of the coordinated detonations of four gas tankers bore the hallmarks of the militant group's followers.
[How did they get their hands on FOUR gas tankers WITHOUT US KNOWING?
Sniiffff!!]
Survivors described scenes of panic after the blasts in Qahtaniya, Tal Adeer, and Jezeera leveled the villages' warrens of earthen hovels and shops.
Murad Samku, a 30-year-old farmer being treated at a hospital in nearby Sinjar for contusions but desperate to get back to the disaster scene to search for his family:
"The roofs fell on our heads. What I saw last night in the darkness was a horrible image of my beloved village. The land is deserted now. There's nothing left."
The region's limited medical facilities were overrun. Many victims suffered multiple broken bones or had severed, bleeding limbs.
Kifah Mohammed, a doctor at the Sinjar hospital:
"Most of these cases are in critical condition, and we are suffering from a lack of medicines and medical staff."
US and other coalition military forces shuttled the injured to other hospitals for treatment, said Mohammed. Doctors appealed for urgent deliveries of painkillers, bandages, syringes, and other medical supplies, a UN relief agency reported.
The Yazidis, an ancient community that is neither Islamic nor Christian and holds divine an archangel that some Muslims contend is Satan, have suffered persecution and conflict with other religions through the ages. Yazidis contended they were targeted because of their isolation and vulnerability.
Nassr Haji, a Yazidi journalist from Sinjar:
"This area was the easiest to get to so that those backward people could express their hatred for Kurds."
A curfew was imposed throughout the Yazidi region, about 70 miles west of Mosul, with only police and emergency vehicles allowed to move among the smoldering rubble rife with the smell of decomposing remains.
Colonel Ahmed Salem of the Qahtaniya police force told the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs:
"Some experts have come from Baghdad to help us determine which body parts belong to which bodies. At least 40 patients are in a critical situation and, according to doctors, could die at any moment, thus increasing the death toll."
The three shattered villages were refugee settlements of about 35,000 each established after the regime of Saddam Hussein drove Yazidis from Arab-dominated regions of northern Iraq in 1975, said Waad Hamad Mattu, head of the Yazidi Movement for Reform and Progress, which has a sole representative in the Iraqi parliament.
Mattu said:
"We cannot precisely identify the attackers at the moment, but I expect those cockroaches will publish a statement on the Internet about their attack."
Also yesterday, US and Iraqi forces launched a fresh strike against insurgent sanctuaries in Baghdad with Operation Marne Husky, aimed at capturing bomb-builders and militant strategists. At least seven civilians were killed in Baghdad violence, and 15 bodies were found in the morning.
[ANOTHER Operation!]
Ten Iraqis, including a young girl, died in clashes between insurgents and local Sunni Arabs in Diyala Province, two died in separate car bombings in Kirkuk, and five were killed in an ambush of a minibus in Khalis, 50 miles north of Baghdad."
"Iraq Toll at 250 in the Deadliest Attack of the War" by JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Aug. 15 — The toll in a horrific quadruple bombing in an area of mud and stone houses in the remote northern desert on Tuesday evening reached at least 250 dead and 350 wounded, several local officials said Wednesday, making it the deadliest coordinated attack since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Rescuers and recovery teams were still digging through as many as 200 flattened houses, and the death toll could still rise significantly, the officials said.
Dr. Kifah Kattu, director general of the hospital in Sinjar, a few miles north of where the explosions occurred:
“It is impossible for us to give an exact figure for the dead and wounded.”
[I heard the death toll is up to 500 now!]
As an example, he cited one village in the area of the explosions, called Al Aziz, where he said 40 of the village’s simple homes had been obliterated and no dead or wounded had yet been recovered.
Residents of the area that the attack struck are mostly Kurdish-speaking, and members of the Yazidi religious sect, which combines elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions, are predominant.
Hasson Dalali, 59, a farmer who survived one of the explosions, said from a hospital in Tal Afar, a town 40 miles northeast of the explosions, that he had lost eight members of his family:
“I saw a flash in the sky; I never saw anything like this before.”
He said that after two huge explosions threw him to the ground where he was working his fields, he rushed to his house to check on his family:
“The house was completely flattened to the ground. I was looking for any survivor from my family in the rubble. I found only my 12-year-old nephew.”
The nephew had broken ribs and legs and severe wounds to his head, Mr. Dalali said.
Security officials said that the devastation came when two pairs of truck bombs exploded about five miles apart in an area close to the Syrian border in what is known as the Shaam Desert. An official at the Interior Ministry in Baghdad said that precise information on the bombings was particularly difficult to obtain.
The two areas that were struck, called Qahtaniya and Jazeera, sit along a road running southwest from Sinjar through desert and farmland. Again and again, survivors at nearby hospitals described gigantic blasts that wiped out whole families and left an apocalyptic landscape of crumbled mud huts scattered with human remains.
Fawaz Mamdooh, a lieutenant in the Iraqi police who was on duty at the time and rushed to the rubble of his house:
“I am trying to find survivors from the family. I found half the body of my brother, and his head in another place. I didn’t find my wife, my sons or my parents.”
[Good Lord! Oh, what have we done to Iraq?
WHAT HAVE WE DONE?]
Mahmood Qasim, a civil defense officer who went to the scene, said the devastation was like nothing he had ever witnessed:
“You can only see remains and wounded people moaning and screaming in pain, and destroyed houses and rubble everywhere. The whole area is a place of catastrophe.”
The mounting death toll came on a day when a meeting -- not attended by the head of the largest Sunni Arab party, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi -- on the crisis arranged by the increasingly isolated prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, again achieved no tangible results.
Mr. Hashemi did express outrage at the bombings in northern Iraq, which took place on the same day at least 100 gunmen in Iraqi Army uniforms snatched the deputy oil minister... and several colleagues from a protected residential compound in Baghdad.
Mr. Hashemi said that both incidents raised questions over “who was benefiting from such acts,” which he said took place “while the government and its security apparatus remain silent.”
[Yeah, and if everything calmed down in Iraq, we would have to leave, right?
What was Blackwater up to in Iraq yesterday? Hmmmmmm!]
