Iraqi leaders forge new alliance

Hospitals are running out of medicines in the Qahtaniya region.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s political leaders emerged Thursday from three days of crisis talks with a new alliance that seeks to save the crumbling U.S.-backed government. But the reshaped power bloc included no Sunnis and immediately raised questions about its legitimacy as a unifying force.

The political gambit came as teams in northern Iraq tallied the grim figures from the deadliest wave of suicide attacks of the war and — in a rare moment of joy since Tuesday’s devastation — pulled four children alive from the rubble.

“We didn’t hear them calling out for help until moments before a bulldozer would have killed them as it cleared the rubble,” said Saad Muhanad, a municipal council member in the Qahtaniya region, where four bomb-laden trucks turned clay and stone homes into tombs for hundreds belonging to a small religious group considered as infidels by hard-line Muslims.

Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said Thursday that at least 400 were dead — apparently all members of the ancient Yazidi sect that mixes elements of Islam, Christianity and other faiths. Some authorities outside the central government had said at least 500 people died and have not revised that figure downward.

The four small survivors were related, Muhanad said, but he did not know if they were siblings. No other details about the children were known. The freed youngsters began running through the streets begging for food and water.

“In a while, some of their families came and took them away,” said Muhanad.

The mayor of the region pleaded for help, meanwhile, saying an even larger tragedy loomed if the shattered communities did not get food, water and medicine soon.

“People are in shock. Hospitals here are running out of medicine. The pharmacies are empty. We need food, medicine and water otherwise there will be an even greater catastrophe,” said Abdul-Rahim al-Shimari, mayor of the Baaj district, which includes the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi villages hit by the suicide blasts blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq.