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The four truckbombs that hit two remote villages of Iraqi Kurdistan were so far away from Baghdad that they could only be mentioned briefly when they occurred on Tuesday. Next day the catastrophic toll from the coordinated attacks in Sinjar and Qahataniyah started to sink in: at least 230 are dead, perhaps as many as 500. The villages are populated by adherents of the ancient Yazidi religion, which predates the conversion of the Kurds to Islam. Both ABC and NBC reported on the atrocity from Baghdad, with ABC choosing the Story of the Day as its lead. NBC and CBS opted instead to lead with Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell, closing below the 13000 benchmark.

ABC's Miguel Marquez diagramed the truckbomb attacks with the help of his network's Virtual View computer animation: the first bomb was hidden in a water truck as residents stood in line to fill containers; the second was in a fuel truck where the line was for diesel; the third was a suicide attack as a truck plowed into a crowded bus station; the fourth exploded in a marketplace. NBC's Tom Aspell narrated footage of the destruction, calling Qahataniyah "obliterated…the force of an earthquake shattering more than 70 clay-built houses."

From the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin calculated that the death toll makes these bombs "the worst terrorist attack of the entire war," since the US military suspects that al-Qaeda is the guilty party. Martin quoted two conflicting explanations by Gen Benjamin Mixon for the motives behind the attack. Either publicity--"they are looking to gain worldwide attention to try to throw us off our plan"--or more plainly "genocide, there is no other way to put it." From Beirut, NBC's Richard Engel sided with the latter theory: radical Sunnis in Iraq are "trying to ethnically cleanse all the groups they believe are not Islamic. In this case it was the Yazidis but other minorities, including Christians, have been leaving Iraq in record numbers."

Engel and Martin then turned to a couple of other Iraq developments. Martin reported that Gen David Petraeus now has a timeline for when his misnamed surge of troops will end. He plans to pull combat brigades out of Iraq at the rate of one a month starting in December 2007, ending in June 2008, at which time US troop levels will have reverted to pre-surge numbers. What enables his plan is the estimate that 30,000 former Sunni insurgents have joined up, a force of equal size to the entire surge--"and with much better intelligence."

For his part, Engel previewed a future regional power struggle now that "Iraq has effectively collapsed, leaving a huge power vacuum in the center." He envisaged a "new Cold War" in the region between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Engel reported that US strategists expect a "frontline force" in this Cold War to be Teheran's Quds Force, funding and reinforcing militias in Iraq and supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon. In an effort to block the Quds Force, the White House is considering designating it terrorist organization even though it is funded by the Iranian state.

Andrew Tyndall 8/17/07 2:28:41 am

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