U.S. officials said on Thursday there was little hope of finding anyone still alive in the rubble of scores of houses destroyed by suicide bombers in northern Iraq.
Possible death tolls given by officials from the apparently coordinated truck bombings of two remote villages inhabited by members of the minority Yazidi sect ranged from 175 to as high as 500. Hundreds more were wounded.
Rescuers dug through the rubble of bomb-flattened buildings throughout Wednesday in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone. Bodies covered by blankets were laid in the street and outside a municipal building.
Major Rodger Lemons, operations officer for a U.S. brigade in the area, said on Thursday rescue efforts were beginning to wind up. About 600 people had been made homeless, he added.
"My assessment is there's probably no one left alive in the rubble," he added. "We've transitioned through to a clean-up phase."
The U.S. military has said al Qaeda is the prime suspect for the attack on the Yazidis, seen by Sunni militants as infidels.
Lemons said it appeared two garbage trucks packed with explosives had been driven into each of the two villages, Kahtaniya and al-Jazeera.
In al-Jazeera, Iraqi security forces shot and killed the driver of one truck before it reached the village. Both trucks detonated in Kahtaniya village, he said.
The bombings were the worst coordinated attack in Iraq since November 2006, when six car bombs in different areas of Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City killed 200 people and wounded 250. That was the biggest attack since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
