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Deadliest attack in Iraq to date (14 August/1 Shabaan) with death toll growing. If the local Iraqi reports are correct, twice as many were killed in these attacks as any previous bombing to date in the four years since 2003. It is quite possibly just a small preview of the Rwanda-style genocidal bloodbath that awaits all of Iraq. Had these victims been the majority Shia instead of the tiny community of Yazidis, all of Iraq would likely be disintegrating into utter chaos tonight. After four years of slow motion catastrophe, there is nothing left to keep Iraq from going past the tipping point of all-out nationwide genocide that all have feared.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/08/15/iraq.main/index.html

Iraqi officials: Truck bombings killed at least 500

(excerpted)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday. Iraqi Army and Mosul police sources earlier put the number at 260, but said it was likely to rise. 320 were reported wounded.

The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a “trademark al Qaeda event” designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.

The attacks, targeting Kurdish villages of the Yazidi religious minority, were attempts to “break the will” of the American people and show that the U.S. troop escalation — the “surge” — is failing, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon said.

The bombings highlight the kind of sectarian tensions the troop surge was designed to stop.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is predominantly Sunni, and Mixon said members of the Yazidi religious minority have received threatening letters, called “night letters,” telling them “to leave because they are infidels.”

“This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will — almost genocide when you consider the fact the target they attacked and the fact that these Yazidis, out in a very remote part of Nineveh province, where there is very little security and really no security required to this point,” Mixon said. Sunni militants, including members of al Qaeda in Iraq, have targeted Yazidis in the area before.

Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said there were three suicide trucks carrying two tons of explosives. At least 30 houses and other buildings were destroyed.

Khalaf said the carnage looks like the aftermath of a “mini-nuclear explosion.” More bodies are expected to be found.The U.S. military said there were five bombings — four at a crowded bus station in Qahtaniya and a fifth in al-Jazeera.

The massacre comes ahead of next month’s report to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on progress in Iraq. . .

CNN’s Arwa Damon, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Raja Razek contributed to this report.