Grief and anger consumed a minority religious sect in northern Iraq yesterday after suicide truck bombers killed at least 250 people and wounded 350 in the deadliest coordinated attacks since the March 2003 invasion.

Rescuers were still digging through the rubble of flattened clay houses more than 24 hours after the blasts, which tore through residential areas west of the city of Mosul that are inhabited by the Yazidi.

The US military said that the style and scale of the carnage bore the hall-marks of al-Qaeda, noting that it had expected such suicide bombings in advance of a key report to the US Congress next month on the security situation in Iraq.

“This is an act of ‘ethnic cleansing’, if you will, almost genocide, when you consider the fact of the target they attacked, and the fact that these Yazidis are really out in a very remote part of Nineveh province where there is very little security, and really no security required up until this point,” Major-General Benjamin Mixon, the commander of US forces in northern Iraq, told CNN.

Four suicide truck bombers struck at least two villages, al-Qataniyah and al-Adnaniyah, in close succession on Tuesday. The US military put the number of vehicle bombs at five. Images of crying children wrapped in bloodied bandages on hospital beds were shown on Iraqi television, which also broadcast appeals for blood donors. “The explosion was huge . . . Many people were torn into pieces,” he said.

The death toll surpassed that of the previous deadliest attack, when 215 people were killed by mortar fire and five car bombs in Sadr City, Baghdad, last November.

Some members of the Yazidi community swore revenge unless the Iraqi Government caught the perpetrators. “We can get 13,000 armed people in a few days to avenge and protect ourselves,” said Baba Sheikh.

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