At least 175 people were killed last night in a quadruple suicide attack on a town in northern Iraq.

In one of the bloodiest atrocities since the fall of Saddam Hussein at least another 200 people were wounded in the bombings in separate areas of the town of Kahtaniya, west of Mosul, Iraqi army Captain Mohammad al-Jaad said.

The attacks on the Yazidi community occurred about 8pm local time leaving whole apartment buildings destroyed and several shops nearby ablaze.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but they bore the hallmark of al-Qaeda, which has been regrouping in the north of the country after being driven from safe havens in Anbar and Diyala provinces.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since 215 people were killed in November when mortar rounds and five car bombs killed brought carnage to the Shia neighbourhood of Sadr City in Baghdad.

Dhakil Qassim, mayor of Sinjar, a town near where the attacks occurred, said al-Qaeda in Iraq was behind the attack, citing what he said were Kurdish government intelligence reports.

He said: “This is a terrorist act and the people targeted are poor Yazidis who have nothing to do with the armed conflict."

The White House condemned the attacks as “barbaric”.

The Yazidis are members of a Kurdish pre-Islamic religious sect that have been the target of frequent attacks in northern Iraq.

The huge loss of life came on the same day as dozens of uniformed gunmen in 17 official vehicles stormed an Oil Ministry compound in Baghdad and abducted a deputy oil minister and four other officials.

A total of nine US military deaths were also announced after a transport helicopter crashed near an air base west of Baghdad, killing five troopers. The CH-47 Chinook helicopter had been conducting a routine post-maintenance test flight when it went down near Taqaddum air base. Four other soldiers were reported killed in separate attacks.

Yazidis — who number some 500,000 — speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.

They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Koranic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.

Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.

The community has attempted to remain aloof from the vicious sectarian and political conflicts gripping much of the rest of Iraq, but in recent months relations with nearby Sunni Muslim communities have worsened dramatically.

On April 7, a mob of Yazidi men stoned to death Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old girl from their own people who had offended conservative local values by running away to marry a young Muslim man.

The savage murder was captured on cellphone videos and widely distributed, and Sunni extremists were quick to stage what they described as revenge attacks, but which resembled the sectarian killings elsewhere in Iraq.

On April 23, gunmen stopped a bus carrying workers home to the dead girl’s community, the village of Beshika six miles outside Mosul, dragged out 23 Yazidis and shot them dead.

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