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Death toll from Iraq bombings jumps to 400

* At least seven people killed in Baghdad car bomb explosion
* Two US soldiers also killed in capital

BAGHDAD: The death toll from four suicide truck bomb attacks in northern Iraq has risen to 400, a top official said on Thursday, making it by far the deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein four years ago.

“More than 400 people were killed and the toll is expected to rise,” the director of operations at the interior ministry, Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf, told AFP.

The number of people killed was also the highest single toll since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in which around 3,000 people died. Khalaf said the four suicide bombers packed two tonnes of explosives into their lorries, unleashing massive devastation on members of the ancient Yazidi religious sect in the northern province of Nineveh on Tuesday.

The new toll was announced as rescuers pulled corpses from the rubble two days after the bombings, as teams of army, police and civilians clawed through the carnage of pancaked homes in the villages of Al Qataniyah and Al Adnaniyah.

As the grim search for the dead continued, the US military blamed Al Qaeda for the latest attacks, which came with US and Iraqi forces pressing a massive nationwide crackdown against violence.

“The rescue teams are facing lot of obstacles because the region is far away,” Khalaf said earlier, explaining the lengthy clean-up operation. “It takes a day just to reach the site of the devastation.”

Officials had previously said that more than 200 people were killed and 375 injured in the multiple blasts on the rough, isolated terrain. American troops said they were airlifting food, medicines, bandages and blankets for the victims of the blasts.

General David Petraeus, the head of US-led forces in Iraq, gives a crucial progress report on operations in early September, and US commanders have accused extremists of looking to undermine successes that have been made.

On Thursday, a car bomb exploded in a popular Baghdad shopping complex, killing at least seven people and injuring another 15, security officials said as the US military announced the deaths of two more soldiers in the capital.

Pressing the political agenda, Iraq’s top Shia and Kurdish leaders also announced a new alliance to salvage Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki’s embattled government but – crucially – without rival Sunni leaders. President Jalal Talabani and Maliki announced the alliance between mainstream Shia and Kurdish parties, but made no mention of Sunni leaders.

“Signing this agreement will help solve many problems in the present crisis and encourage the others to join us,” Talabani told a joint news conference with the prime minister. Thursday’s deal formalised an alliance between Maliki’s Dawa party, Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi’s Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party.

But Sunni Vice President Tareq Al Hashemi and his National Concord Front boycotted talks, which led to the new bloc’s creation, and the government remains bitterly split along sectarian and ethnic lines. “This is a patriotic agreement which was not struck in the interests of the signing parties but in those of the Iraqi people and the government of national unity and the march of democracy in Iraq,” Talabani said. “The doors are still open to all those who agree with us that the political process must go ahead,” Maliki said.

“Our brothers in the two Kurdish parties have exerted efforts (to win the Sunnis’ support). We would also exert efforts to get their participation in the political process as basically our government represents all Iraqi people.”

Lawmaker Mahmud Othman, a Kurd, said the new power structure had been under consideration for a “long time and would form a government of majority.” afp

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