Yazidi remain in peril despite US airstrikes
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AIRSTRIKES pounded the area around Iraq’s largest dam yesterday in an effort to drive out militants who captured it earlier this month, as reports emerged of the massacre of about 80 members of the Yazidi religious minority by Islamic extremists.
People living near the Mosul Dam said the area was being targeted by airstrikes, but it was not clear if they were being carried out by forces from Iraq or the United States, which last week launched an air campaign aimed at halting the advance of the Islamic State group across the country’s north.
The extremist group seized the dam on the Tigris River on August 7. Residents said the strikes killed militants, but that could not immediately be confirmed.
A Yazidi lawmaker and a Kurdish security official meanwhile said Islamic State fighters massacred scores of Yazidi men on Friday afternoon after seizing the village of Kocho. Both warned that the minority group remains in danger despite US aid drops and airstrikes launched to protect them.
Islamic State fighters besieged the village for several days and gave its Yazidi residents a deadline to convert to Islam, Yazidi lawmaker Mahma Khalil said yesterday.
“When the residents refused, the massacre took place,” he said.
Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for Kurdish security forces, said militants took the women and children of Kocho to the nearby city of Tal Afar, which is controlled by the Islamic State group.
The plight of the Yazidis, tens of thousands of whom were stranded on a desert mountaintop for days, encircled by the Islamic extremists, prompted the US to launch aid lifts and airstrikes to help Kurdish fighters get them to safety.
Most of the Yazidis were eventually able to escape to Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region. About 1.5 million people have been displaced by fighting since the Islamic State group’s rapid advance across northern and western Iraq began in June.
Growing concern
The decision to launch airstrikes marked the first direct US military intervention in Iraq since its last troops withdrew in 2011, and reflected growing international concern about the extremist group, which has carved out a self-styled Islamic state in large parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense yesterday said it deployed a US-made spy plane over northern Iraq to monitor the crisis and movements of Islamic State militants. The converted Boeing KC-135 tanker will monitor cellphone calls and other communication, it said.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was in Baghdad yesterday, where he said his government will provide more than 24 million euros (US$32 million) in humanitarian aid to Iraq.
“The first German air force planes are flying to Irbil at this moment to deliver aid,” he said in a joint press conference with Iraq’s acting Foreign Minister Hussein Shahristani.
Two British planes carrying humanitarian supplies also landed yesterday in the Kurdish regional capital of Irbil.
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