Those damned camera phones.
What kind of nihilistic monsters see a benefit to murdering and maiming hundreds of innocent men, women and children?
Women were killed at market; children were buried as clay and mud houses collapsed.
Entire neighborhoods were flattened.
Scores of families were obliterated in the attack, which wiped out a market and a bus station.
"We've always said al-Qaeda would try to carry out sensational attacks this month in particular," said Petraeus.
Petraeus and Crocker have the reputation of being independent-minded and frank. But at a time like this, such qualities are not primarily what the White House wants.
Faced with what looks from afar like a Hobbesian war of all against all, if not a descent into hell itself, the normal instinct of human beings to exercise their moral faculties grows numb.
Poor families in the Yazidi community often crowd as many as 30 people in one home.
Rescuers dug through the rubble throughout Wednesday in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone. Bodies covered by blankets were laid in the street.
"I'm calling on the government and the officials to remove those bodies and bury them because they will cause diseases that could be worse than the results of the explosions themselves," he said.
"We are thirsty. We have had no water for days."
"Families are now wandering in the wilderness."
"We've transitioned through to a clean-up phase."
"We didn't hear them calling out for help until moments before a bulldozer would have killed them as it cleared the rubble." The freed youngsters began running through the streets begging for food and water.
Many believe that the suicide blasts were the culmination of a tragic love story.
In April Du’a Khalil Aswad, 17, was stoned to death following claims that she had abandoned her Yazidi faith and converted to Islam to be with her Sunni Muslim boyfriend.
Her "execution" - carried out to restore her family’s honour - was captured by mobile phone cameras and posted on the internet.
"We do not have the real potential to tackle the problem," said Abdullah. "If we are not even able to provide residents with ration cards, how can we save them now under the rubble?"
Large areas have been utterly destroyed. Rescuers continue to search, using their hands to dig for families who may have died together.
"Several of our relatives were hit. Two of them are dead, six are wounded and three others from one single family are still missing and we don't know where they are."
"The roofs fell on our heads," said Murad Samku, a 30-year-old farmer being treated at a hospital in nearby Sinjar for contusions but desperate to get back to the disaster scene to search for his family. "What I saw last night in the darkness was a horrible image of my beloved village. The land is deserted now. There's nothing left."
