Baghdad - Even Iraqis, who are used to daily reports of terror attacks and massacres on local television, are shocked by the latest images from the Kurdish villages. Children covered in blood, the injured groaning in overcrowded hospitals, houses that have been razed to the ground - the cruelty the suicide bombers have brought to the two villages of Gir Uzair and Siba Sheikh Khidr is so unbearable that Western TV stations only show their audiences small bits of it.
"This is so crazy and disgusting that it can never be erased from the history of Iraq," Baghdad university student Firaz Abdul Wahab says. "If you see that, you won't believe that we live in the 21st century," he says as he watches the TV pictures from the north.
But grief and compassion are not the only feelings stirring in Iraqis when they see the suffering of people who have been haunted by suicide bombers on the streets and in their own homes.
They are also angry with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government and with the US troops, who fail to do anything to prevent massacres like this.
Many people are also angry with the fighting parties in Baghdad, who have not managed in days to organize a meeting at which all the important political and ethnic groups in the country can find a common strategy to curb the violence.
"What has happened in these village is such a tragedy," a Kurdish journalist in Suleimaniya says in shock. The injured for whom there was no space in the Sindshar hospital are now being treated in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.
Security forces in the province Ninive, to which the villages of the Kurdish Yazidis belong, are sure that Sunni fanatics were behind the blood bath.
However, as with earlier serious attacks in Iraq, conspiracy theories are flourishing this time too.
The Sunni Council of religious scholars - the supreme authority of Arab Sunnis in Iraq - speculates that "a group with great (destructive) powers and possibilities" was behind the series of attacks.
Other Sunnis even claim that the president of the Kurdish autonomous region, Massud Barzani, is exploiting the terror in the Yazidi villages to justify the mission of Kurdish fighters ("peshmerga") to the Sindshar region.
