Iraq has been a killing field since Anglo American occupation- ENB

Toll rises above 500 in Iraq bombings
By Damien Cave and James Glanz

Tuesday, August 21, 2007 BAGHDAD: One week after a series of truck bombs hit a poor rural area near the Syrian border, the known casualty toll has soared to more than 500 dead and 1,500 wounded, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, making it the bloodiest coordinated attack since the American-led invasion in 2003.
Dr. Said Hakki, the director of the society, said Tuesday that local Red Crescent workers registering families for aid after the explosions near the town of Sinjar had compiled the new numbers, which dwarf the earlier estimates of at least 250 dead.
The toll, Dr. Hakki said, may yet rise. Emergency workers continued to drag body parts from the site's dusty rubble. Among the wounded, one in five suffered serious wounds, and hospital officials reported that hundreds of families had taken their broken loved ones home, despite the threat of infection.
"We have declared the villages a disaster area," said Khidhir Khader Rashu, the mayor of Qahtaniya, one of the villages crushed by the blasts. "What we've received of food supplies and other aid so far is not enough, because the scale of destruction is so huge."
Statistical certainty can be difficult to obtain after bomb attacks, and some government officials near the villages have put the death toll closer to 360. But the Red Crescent figures align with estimates from two hospital officials in the area and with the typical ratio of dead to wounded from big bomb attacks.
With the latest figures, the attack has become the deadliest coordinated assault since the 2003 invasion by a factor of three. In July about 155 people died in a giant explosion in the northern town of Amerli.
A similar number were killed in a series of bombings and mortar attacks in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad last November, and about 152 died in Tal Afar last month from a double truck bombing.
In the area of last week's attack, the desert villages dominated by Yazidis — a Kurdish-speaking sect whose faith combines Islamic teachings with other ancient religions — struggled to cope. Residents and officials say a constant flow of burials has filled the streets amid the stench of death arising from mounds of beige brick.
Tecken Kuli Saleem, 39, said she had stayed alive for 12 hours under the rubble, but emerged without her family.
"I was pregnant in my fourth month and lost my baby in the attack," she said. "I can't talk much. The criminals killed my family, and I don't know where my children are, whether they're dead or alive. They're missing."
Many families of the wounded have been so shaken by the attacks that they refused to leave their loved ones in hospitals, ferrying them back to small villages where they hoped for safety in numbers.
At the main hospital in Tal Afar, an official said only 15 wounded people remained on Tuesday. Dr. Kifah Kattu, the director general of the hospital in Sinjar, a few miles north of where the explosions occurred, said all 300 of the hospital's wounded patients had been taken home or to smaller clinics and aid tents near family homes.
Every day, he and another hospital official said, doctors and aid workers from the villages visit the hospital to collect supplies for those who have left.
"Doctors were astonished because their relatives insisted on taking them," Dr. Kattu said. "They thought that Sinjar was too dangerous."
Duraid Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, said several regiments of Iraqi soldiers had been deployed to protect the area. Sand barriers have been built around three villages in greater Qahtaniya "to secure the area and prevent any strangers from entering," he said.
He added that the explosions leveled more than 1,000 houses, most of them made of mud and stone, while another 500 were damaged.
Khader Rashu, the mayor of Qahtaniya, said little hope of finding any survivors remained. "We are facing some difficulties in removing the debris," he said, "because there are some concrete blocks that need to be broken up."
Iraqi officials said no suspects had been arrested. Sunni extremists, who have been warring with Kurds in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, are believed to be responsible for the attack.
Yazidis may have been targets because of their proximity to Syria's porous border; for their beliefs (they worship an angel whose name is sometimes translated as Satan in the Koran); or as retribution for an episode in April, when some Yazidis stoned a young Yazidi woman to death for marrying a Sunni.
For now, the Iraqi and international effort remains focused on helping the grieving, the wounded and the destitute. American troops have helped distribute water and other emergency supplies.
Dr. Hakki of the Red Crescent Society said at least three trucks full of aid had come from the Turkish government. At least nine trucks brought supplies from the Red Crescent Society, carrying basic equipment.
"We supplied tents," Dr. Hakki said. "We supplied kitchen utensils."
The society has also provided cash and food. He said the families of the 500 who died had received $100 for each person killed, and six months of food rations. Relatives of the wounded received $50 each and the six months' worth of meals.
The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has distributed $1,600 payments to more than 300 families of those killed, according to local government officials.
Few residents or local leaders seemed to feel it was enough.
Yazidis from across the north, where the sect is most concentrated, said they feared that their community of several hundred thousand might not recover.
"I've lost 32 people from the families of my five brothers and four sisters," said Rasheed Muhsin Khesru, 59, a Yazidi from Kirkuk.
Others said the attack would only accelerate Iraq's already dizzying level of violence.
"In a few days, 10,000 of our men will be ready to protect our areas," said Kheder Aziz, who was sobbing on a street in Kirkuk. "All the Sunni Arab tribes living around us are responsible, either because they helped with the attack or knew what would happen."


Bush warns of Iraqi ‘killing fields’
By Edward Luce in Washington
Published: August 22 2007 14:31 Last updated: August 22 2007 18:12

George W. Bush on Wednesday said the consequences of a US withdrawal from Iraq could echo the “killing fields” genocide that destroyed Cambodia after the US pulled out from Vietnam in the mid-1970s.
In a speech signalling Mr Bush is in no mood to compromise with his Iraq war critics, the US president threw down the gauntlet in advance of Democratic plans next month to revive a congressional vote setting a deadline for withdrawal of most of the 160,000 US troops in Iraq.
ADVERTISEMENTMuch of Mr Bush’s speech, which was delivered in Kansas City to the US Veterans of Foreign Wars, focused on the history of the US occupation of Japan and Germany after the second world war and on the aftermath of the US military pull-out from Indochina.
“The price of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people”, “re-education camps” and “killing fields”, Mr Bush said. “Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Withdrawal without getting the job done would be a disaster.”
The US president, who appeared to be in ebullient spirits, also reprised his controversial linking of democracy to religious values. “We are still in the early hours of the current ideological struggle,” he said. “Our world will never be safe until the people of the Middle East know the freedom that our Creator intended for all.”
Wednesday’s speech, which offered a strong echo of the neoconservative agenda that characterised Mr Bush’s first term, was greeted with derision by many of Mr Bush’s critics. In a statement, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, said: “We need to stop refereeing the war and start getting out now.”
Anthony Cordesman, a leading Iraq analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: “Mr Bush preaches to the choir without noticing that the choir is getting smaller every time. The American people needed to hear about prospects on the ground in Iraq. Instead we got a history lesson that would have embarrassed a first year undergraduate.”
Lawrence Korb, a Vietnam war veteran and now senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said: “If President Bush had served in Vietnam he would have been more cautious about expecting we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Had we remained bogged down in Vietnam when there was no military solution we would not have been able to win the Cold War.”
Mr Bush’s speech comes less than a month before David Petraeus, the US general in charge in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad, report to Congress on the progress achieved by the “new way forward in Iraq” that Mr Bush unveiled in January.
Mr Bush has argued for more time to assess the progress of the 30,000 troop “surge” that was only completed in mid-June. But a growing number of Republican lawmakers, most of whose seats are vulnerable in next year’s elections, have expressed impatience with the slow pace of political reform in Baghdad.
On Wednesday, Freedom Watch, a Republican group that is run by Ari Fleischer, who was Mr Bush’s first presidential spokesman, launched a $15m television campaign focused on the districts of Republican and Democratic lawmakers who are wavering.
Its targets, which include moderate Republican senators, such as Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, are mostly the same as those targeted by a $12m media campaign by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, an anti-war group.
“These ads are squeezing from the right the very same Republicans who are feeling the heat from their constituents back home for their support for Bush’s failed war policy,” said Moira Mack, spokeswoman for the group.