Qahtaniyah bombings

Background

For several months before the attack, tensions had escalated in northern Iraq's Nineveh Governorate between the Yazidi religious minority and Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds. Some Yazidis reportedly received threatening letters calling them "infidels," and leaflets circulated denouncing Yazidis as "anti-Islamic" and warning of an imminent attack. The bombings were possibly linked to the earlier killing of Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old Yazidi girl stoned to death by fellow Yazidis four months prior, reportedly over her wish to convert religion to marry a Sunni man. After video of that stoning spread online, Sunni gunmen reportedly stopped minibuses carrying Yazidis and killed 23 Yazidi men. Separately, the Sinjar area — home to a mixed population of Yazidis, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, and Arabs — was scheduled to hold a plebiscite in December 2007 on joining the Kurdistan Region, a prospect that reportedly angered neighboring Arab communities. In response to rising violence, roughly 600 Kurdish Peshmerga forces were deployed to the area, and protective ditches were dug around Yazidi villages.

The attack

At around 7:20 pm on August 14, 2007, four coordinated suicide bombers detonated a fuel tanker and three car bombs in the Yazidi towns of Qahtaniyah and Jazeera (Siba Sheikh Khidir), near Mosul. An Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman said roughly two tons of explosives were used. The blasts collapsed buildings, trapping families under rubble, and flattened entire neighborhoods. Rescue workers dug through debris by hand searching for survivors. The mayor of the Al-Ba'aj District, Abdul-Rahim al-Shammari, described hospitals running out of medicine and empty pharmacies, warning of a further humanitarian catastrophe. The attack killed 796 people and wounded at least 1,562 others, destroyed around 1,000 homes, and left the two villages almost entirely destroyed — a rescue worker estimated 80 percent of one village was destroyed or damaged.

Responsibility and aftermath

Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bombings. Iraq's President Jalal Talabani accused Iraqi Sunni insurgents, citing a history of Sunni violence against Yazidis and the earlier distribution of leaflets branding Yazidis "anti-Islamic." US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said Al-Qaeda was considered the "prime suspect." On September 3, 2007, the US military reportedly killed a man identified as Abu Muhammad al-Afri, described as the suspected mastermind of the bombings. The same two villages were among the first Yazidi settlements targeted by the Islamic State during the 2014 Yazidi genocide.