Agence France-Presse,
MOSUL, Iraq (AFP): 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.
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, gunmen dressed as local security forces stormed into a heavily guarded state compound in Baghdad 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.
“At 4:00 pm (1300 GMT), a gang wearing Iraqi security uniforms broke into the compound and kidnapped five employees, including al-Wagaa,” Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani told state television.
He said some of the hostages had already been released, but did not say if Wagaa was among them.
“It was a criminal gang; they have no political or sectarian motives,” Shahristani said.
It was the highest profile kidnapping in Baghdad since five Britons were snatched from the Iraqi finance ministry when men wearing police uniforms stormed the building on May 29. The Britons have still not been released.
The kidnapping itself came hours after a suicide truck bomber shattered a concrete bridge linking Baghdad to the north, killing eight people and sending three cars plunging into the river below, security officials said.
Also 10 more American soldiers were reported killed, including five when their helicopter crashed in the western province of Al-Anbar.
The attacks came on the second day of the latest major US operation against Shiite extremist networks and insurgents linked to Al-Qaeda.
A CH-47 Chinook crashed near the Al-Taqaddum air base in Al-Anbar province while on a routine post-maintenance check, killing five American servicemen, the military said, adding five more soldiers died in other attacks.
The nationwide crackdown has been seen as an attempt to curb violence before General David Petraeus, the head of coalition forces in Iraq, gives a crucial progress report on operations in Iraq in early September.
Given daily sectarian violence and political paralysis, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has called for crisis talks this week of senior leaders from Iraq's bitterly divided communities to try to salvage his crumbling coalition.
In preparation, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, the senior Sunni Arab in the government, met Massud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq, and was set to meet other Kurdish leaders on Wednesday.
But lawmaker Omar Abdul Sattar from the main Sunni bloc, the National Concord Front that walked out of the coalition on August 1, feared Maliki would blame the opposition parties “for the political mess” at the upcoming summit.
Nearly two dozen Iraqis were also killed on Tuesday in other attacks.
