At least 175 people have been killed after four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq.
The four blasts near Mosul left more than 200 people wounded.
The attacks were carried out in two villages of the northern province of Nineveh and targeted the Yazidi community - a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect.
The bombs, one of which was on a fuel tanker, exploded in the villages of Al-Qataniyah and Al-Adnaniyah.
It has been described as one of the worst single incidents in the four-year-old war.
Yazidis, who number some 500,000, speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.
They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Koranic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.
Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.
Earlier today, another suicide truck bomb on a bridge linking Baghdad to northern Iraq killed ten people and wounded six.
A fuel tanker was used in the attack, after which part of the bridge collapsed.
And five US service personnel were killed when a military transport helicopter crashed during a routine flight west of Baghdad.
The CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed near a US military air base close to Falluja, 50km west of Baghdad.
There was no indication whether it was shot down and an investigation is under way.
