A SENIOR official in the Iraqi region that suffered the country’s worst suicide attacks suggested this weekend that any remaining survivors trapped beneath rubble would be left to die.

Colonel Najim Abdullah, the governor of Tal Afar, said there were insufficient resources to continue searching for people among the ruins of Qahtaniya and Adnaniya, two villages devastated by multiple truck bombings last Tuesday.

Up to 200 people are still thought to be unaccounted for, taking the death toll past 500. The victims were mainly members of the Yazidi minority sect, which has made its home around the Sinjar mountains, close to the border with Syria.

“We do not have the real potential to tackle the problem,” said Abdullah. “If we are not even able to provide residents with ration cards, how can we save them now under the rubble?”

The bombings, which the American army has blamed on Al-Qaeda, brought carnage to an area that had previously escaped the worst of Iraq’s violence, and highlighted the precarious position of the country’s religious minorities.

The Yazidis are one of Iraq’s most ancient and mysterious sects. Mainly ethnic Kurds, their religion blends elements of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism. They worship Malak Taus, the Peacock Angel, one of seven archangels who ruled the universe after it was created by God, and do not believe in evil, sin or hell. Wednesday is their holy day.

The sect’s base is a 1,000-year-old former monastery at Lalish, near the northern city of Mosul. The temple is leased out each year to a different family which is entrusted with maintaining its leafy courtyards and halls for visiting pilgrims.

One of Taus’s names is Shaytan, the same as the word for Satan in the Koran, which has led Muslims to spurn the Yazidis as devil-worshippers. Days before last week’s bombings, the Islamic State of Iraq, an Al-Qaeda front group, distributed leaflets in the area, warning that an attack was imminent because the Yazidi are “antiIslamic”.

Many believe that the suicide blasts were the culmination of a tragic love story.

In April Du’a Khalil Aswad, 17, was stoned to death following claims that she had abandoned her Yazidi faith and converted to Islam to be with her Sunni Muslim boyfriend.

Her “execution” - carried out to restore her family’s honour - was captured by mobile phone cameras and posted on the internet.

Two weeks after the stoning, Sunni gunmen killed 23 Yazidis travelling on a bus.

Persecuted minorities

- Yazidis About 500,000 Ethnic Kurds who worship an angel figure

- Shabaks Up to 60,000 A faith which blends Islam and Christianity

- Chaldean Christians Up to 750,000 followers of the Catholic Church of Babylon

- Jews 8-15 Almost wiped out after years of persecution

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