Hours after the blasts, victims were still buried in dusty rubble as American helicopters ferried away the wounded.

“Half the houses are completely collapsed because they were made from clay,” said Capt. Mohammed Ahmad of the Iraqi Army’s 3rd Division. He said scores of families were obliterated in the blast that wiped out a market and a bus station.

Another Iraqi officer described the scene as apocalyptic: “It looks like a nuclear bomb hit the villages,” he said.

The bombs — including at least one rigged to a fuel tanker — detonated in quick succession around 8 p.m. in Qahtaniya and Jazeera, two towns populated mostly by Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking sect that mixes elements of Islam with the teachings of an ancient Persian religion.

The group has long been a minority in Iraq, and after some Yazidis stoned a Yazidi woman to death for dating a Sunni Arab man in April, members of the sect became frequent targets of Sunni attacks. When a video of the Yazidi woman being stoned appeared on the Internet, gunmen stopped minibuses full of Yazidi laborers and killed 23 of them. Many Yazidis have recently moved to villages farther west, where they make up a majority. The deadly assault on Tuesday crushed the hope that there would be safety in numbers — especially near the border with Syria, which American officials have long described as an entry point for foreign fighters.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/world/middleeast/15iraq.html?ex=1344830400&en=429c2c8224f73cf2&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Source: NyTimes.com

About Fred Harteis: Fred Harteis leads Harteis International.  Fred Harteis has a background in agriculture and has created many successful business ventures.