Iraqi Red Crescent says 500 killed in Yazidi attack

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - More than 500 people were killed in last week's suicide truck bombings that targeted the minority Yazidi community in northern Iraq, the Iraqi Red Crescent said on Wednesday.

If the Red Crescent toll is correct, it would make the Aug. 14 bombings in the villages of Kahtaniya and al-Jazeera the worst attack since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Scores of clay-built homes were levelled in last week's bombings, burying entire families in rubble, and Iraqi officials have offered widely differing figures on the death toll.

The governor of Nineveh province last week put the toll at 344 with 70 still missing. Other health officials gave higher figures, although it was not clear what these were based on.

The previous worst attack in post-invasion Iraq, the co-ordinated bombings that hit Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City district in November 2006, killed more than 200 people.

Saeed Haqi Ismael, the head of the Red Crescent in Iraq, told Reuters the organisation's figure was based on lists compiled to distribute financial aid to families who had reported losing relatives in the bombings.

Families received $100 for each relative who had been killed and $50 for every one wounded. He did not say how his organisation was checking the veracity of each claim.

"We have prepared lists to distribute aid to families. We estimated the death toll from those lists to be between 520 and 525," he said.

Ismael said at least 1,500 people had been made homeless by the attacks.

The U.S. military, which has flown blankets, food and water to the stricken area, has said Sunni Islamist al Qaeda is the prime suspect in the attacks. Al Qaeda views Yazidis, who are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect, as infidels.