BAGHDAD, IRAQ - One week after a series of truck bombs hit a poor rural area near the Syrian border, the known casualty toll has soared to more than 500 dead and 1,500 wounded, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, making it by far the bloodiest coordinated attack since the American-led invasion in 2003.

Dr. Said Hakki, the director of the society, said Tuesday that local Red Crescent workers registering families for aid after the explosions near the town of Sinjar had compiled the new numbers, which dwarf the earlier estimates of at least 250 dead.

The toll, Hakki said, may yet rise. Emergency workers continued to drag body parts from the site's dusty rubble. Among the wounded, one in five suffered serious injuries, and hospital officials reported that hundreds of families had taken their broken loved ones home despite the threat of infection.

"We have declared the villages a disaster area," said Khidhir Khader Rashu, the mayor of Qahataniya, one of the villages crushed by the blasts. "What we've received of food supplies and other aid so far is not enough because the scale of destruction is so huge."

Statistical certainty can be difficult to obtain after bomb attacks, and some government officials near the villages have put the death toll closer to 360. But the Red Crescent figures align with estimates from two hospital officials in the area and with the typical ratio of dead to wounded from big bomb attacks.

With the latest figures, the attack becomes the deadliest coordinated assault since the 2003 invasion by a factor of three. In July, about 155 people died in a giant explosion in the northern town of Amerli; a similar number were killed in a series of bombings and mortar attacks in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad in November; and about 152 died in Tal Afar last month from a double truck bombing.

In the area of last week's attack, the desert villages dominated by Yazidis -- a clannish, Kurdish-speaking sect whose faith combines Islamic teachings with other ancient religions -- struggled to cope. Residents and officials said a constant flow of burials had filled the streets amid the stench of death arising from mounds of beige brick.

Tecken Kuli Saleem, 39, said she stayed alive for 12 hours under the rubble but emerged without her family.

"I was pregnant in my fourth month and lost my baby in the attack," she said. "I can't talk much. The criminals killed my family, and I don't know where my children are, whether they're dead or alive. They're missing."

Families fetch wounded

Many families of the wounded have been so shaken by the attacks that they refused to leave their loved ones in hospitals, ferrying them back to small villages where they hoped for safety in numbers.

At the main hospital in Tal Afar, an official said 15 wounded people remained Tuesday. Dr. Kifah Kattu, the director general of the hospital in Sinjar, a few miles north of where the explosions occurred, said all 300 of the hospital's wounded patients had been taken back home or to smaller clinics and aid tents near family homes.

Every day, he and another hospital official said, doctors and aid workers from the villages visit the hospital to collect supplies for those who have left.

"Doctors were astonished because their relatives insisted on taking them," he said. "They thought that Sinjar was too dangerous."

Duraid Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, said several regiments of Iraqi soldiers had been deployed to protect the area. Sand barriers have been built around three villages in greater Qahataniya "to secure the area and prevent any strangers from entering," he said.

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