Yazidis fear annihilation after Iraq bombings

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.
Angry Yazidis pleaded for help in the aftermath of the bombings. "We are thirsty. We have had no water for days," Naif Kudar Ismael said in Kahtaniya, a village of about 1,600.
Nineveh province governor Duraid Kashmoula said the blasts buried entire families. He put the death toll at 220.
Zairyan Othman, minister of health in neighboring Kurdistan, Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region, said 205 were killed and 235 wounded. Iraq's Health Ministry said on Thursday more than 150 were killed and more than 200 wounded.
The bombings were the worst coordinated attack in Iraq since November 2006, when six car bombs in different areas of Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City killed 200 people and wounded 250.
Major Rodger Lemons, operations officer for a U.S. brigade in the area, said rescue efforts were beginning to wind up.
"My assessment is there's probably no one left alive in the rubble," he said. He said about 600 people were homeless.
The U.S. military said between 175 and 180 people had probably been killed. "I don't know if we'll ever get to a point where we'll have an exact figure," Lemons said.
Rescuers dug through the rubble throughout Wednesday in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone. Bodies covered by blankets were laid in the street.
Lemons said it appeared two garbage trucks packed with explosives had been driven to each of the two villages.
In al-Jazeera, where about 800 live, Iraqi security forces shot and killed the driver of one truck outside the village.

Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq

Tony Blair agreed to commit British troops to battle in Iraq in the full knowledge that Washington had failed to make adequate preparations for the postwar reconstruction of the country.
In a devastating account of the chaotic preparations for the war, which comes as Blair enters his final full week in Downing Street, key No 10 aides and friends of Blair have revealed the Prime Minister repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised his concerns with the White House.
He also agreed to commit troops to the conflict even though President George Bush had personally said Britain could help 'some other way'.
The disclosures, in a two-part Channel 4 documentary about Blair's decade in Downing Street, will raise questions about Blair's public assurances at the time of the war in 2003 that he was satisfied with the post-war planning. In one of the most significant interviews in the programme, Peter Mandelson says that the Prime Minister knew the preparations were inadequate but said he was powerless to do more.
'Obviously more attention should have been paid to what happened after, to the planning and what we would do once Saddam had been toppled,' Mandelson tells The Observer's chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, who presents the documentary.
'But I remember him saying at the time: "Look, you know, I can't do everything. That's chiefly America's responsibility, not ours."' Mandelson then criticises his friend: 'Well, I'm afraid that, as we now see, wasn't good enough.'.
Opponents of the war, who have long claimed that the Pentagon planned a short, sharp offensive to overthrow Saddam Hussein with little thought of the consequences, claimed last night that the programme vindicated their criticisms. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, told The Observer: 'These frank admissions that the Prime Minister was aware of the inadequacies of the preparations for post-conflict Iraq are a devastating indictment.'
Blair's most senior foreign affairs adviser at the time of the war makes clear that Blair was 'exercised' on the exact issue raised by the war's opponents. Sir David Manning, now Britain's ambassador to Washington, says: 'It's hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.'
Manning reveals that Blair was so concerned that he sent him to Washington in March 2002, a full year before the invasion. Manning recalls: 'The difficulties the Prime Minister had in mind were particularly, how difficult was this operation going to be? If they did decide to intervene, what would it be like on the ground? How would you do it? What would the reaction be if you did it, what would happen on the morning after?
'All these issues needed to be thrashed out. It wasn't to say that they weren't thinking about them, but I didn't see the evidence at that stage that these things had been thoroughly rehearsed and thoroughly thought through.'
On his return to London, Manning wrote a highly-critical secret memo to Blair. 'I think there is a real risk that the [Bush] administration underestimates the difficulties,' it said. 'They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.'
Within a year Britain lost any hope of a proper reconstruction in Iraq when post-war planning was handed to the Pentagon at the beginning of 2003.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to the postwar administration in Baghdad, confirms that Blair was in despair. 'There were moments of throwing his hands in the air: "What can we do?" He was tearing his hair over some of the deficiencies.' The failure to prepare meant that Iraq quickly fell apart. Greenstock adds: 'I just felt it was slipping away from us really, from the beginning. There was no security force controlling the streets. There was no police force to speak of.'
The revelation that Blair was 'exercised' in private will raise questions about his public assurances. The former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, told the programme he was given a personal assurance by Blair that he was satisfied by the preparations. 'I said to Tony, are you certain?' Kinnock told the programme. 'And when he said: "I'm sure," that was a good enough reassurance.'
Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, confirms that the President offered Blair a way out. Bush told Blair: 'Perhaps there's some other way that Britain can be involved.' Blair replied: 'No, I'm with you.'