Displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community gather for humanitarian aid at the Syria-Iraq border at Feeshkhabour border point, northern Iraq, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014. Kurdish authorities at the border believe some 45,000 Yazidis passed the river crossing in the past week and thousands more are still stranded in the mountains. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed) JONATHAN KROHN
On the dry mountain, the Yazidis fight with the goats for the remaining water. In the distance, the lights of Islamic State checkpoints loom menacingly.
On Sunday, those stuck behind Islamic State lines began reporting the group’s latest slaughter: hundreds of members of their arcane but colourful sect massacred for refusing to convert to Islam.
On the mountain, the rumours from their relatives only added to the sense of panic and despair. One man told this reporter, the only Western news correspondent on Mount Sinjar, that jihadists had stormed through his village, killing every adult, healthy male. Others talked of hundreds of women being abducted. Reports came in elsewhere of women and children being buried alive.
Meanwhile, the survivors on the mountain were fighting off thirst and disease.
The thousands of people left on this mountainside are covered in goat droppings, and have no water to drink, let alone to wash it off.
The children all have diarrhea. Those who have wounds – common, everyday wounds, of feet injured by broken glass, or less common ones such as old shrapnel injuries – see their infections grow without respite. There was no medical care until the arrival of the Iraqi army medical team who allowed The Daily Telegraph to accompany them, and the result is a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable proportions.
There are two ways off the mountain. The Iraqi army helicopter that brought in the medical team can take out a dozen people at a time, too small to make a dent in the numbers, but enough to inspire desperation in those near enough to try and board.
Displaced Iraqis ride on a truck on a mountain road near the Turkish-Iraq border, outside Dahuk, in Iraq Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014 Islamic militants attacked the towns of Sinjar and Zunmar a few days ago. The extremist group’s capture of a string of towns and villages in the north has sent minority communities fleeing for their lives. The Islamic state views members of the Yazidis minority and Shiite Muslims as apostates, and has demanded Christians either convert to Islam or pay a special tax. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
“A helicopter came but there was a scramble. We were able to get our two children on board but there was no room for us. I am worried we will never see them again,” said one Yazidi couple.
A younger man spoke of how he had struggled to get up on the mountain last week, carrying his elderly mother on his back. She was growing weaker by the day. “I’m not sure how we will be able get down,” he said.
There is one road down the mountain, which thousands have now taken, guarded by the one efficient force in the area, the Syrian Kurdish YPG, which is escorting people across that border and then through the territory it controls back into Iraqi Kurdistan.
But to make that journey, you need access to a car. One man had managed to cram half his 27-strong extended family into a vehicle to make the trip. But the rest were stuck behind, with him.
There is a downside to the presence of the YPG, an offshoot of the Turkey-based Kurdish guerrilla group the PKK, who are fearsome and efficient fighters. They have begun to recruit the young men on the mountain into their ranks. Every opportunity to extend the region’s multiple and complex wars is taken.
U.S. and Kurdish flags flutter in the wind while displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community cross the Syria-Iraq border at Feeshkhabour bridge over the Tigris River at Feeshkhabour border point, in northern Iraq, Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014. Kurdish authorities at the border believe some 45,000 Yazidis passed the river crossing in the past week and thousands more are still stranded in the mountains. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
It was estimated over the weekend that up to 150,000 people were stranded on the mountain, but there were only a few thousand in the area visited by The Daily Telegraph. It is impossible to say how many have died cowering on the mountain’s slopes.
Back down the mountainside, the refugees’ relatives were facing a deadline set by the jihadists to convert or die – sufficient reason not to simply return home.
The Iraqi human rights minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, said that more than 500 Yazidis had been killed, some buried alive in a mass grave. He said the government had photographic evidence.
He also referred to repeated claims that hundreds of women had been seized and taken to Mosul.
Families report their women have gone missing, though there are competing claims as to what has happened to them.
He added that militants from Islamic State, who believe the Yazidis are devil-worshippers owing to their reverence for a fallen, but restored angel, had been pictured celebrating the atrocity by waving their weapons and cheering beside the dead bodies.
“In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses,” he said.
“This is a vicious atrocity.”
Mr Shia al-Sudani, who was speaking to Reuters, said that eyewitness accounts of the killings had come from refugees fleeing the Sinjar region in northern Iraq, an ancient home for the Yazidis, which came under attack from extremist gunmen under Islamic State’s banner.
He added: “The terrorist Islamic State has also taken at least 300 Yazidi women as slaves and locked some of them inside a police station in Sinjar and transferred others to the town of Tal Afar. We are afraid they will take them outside the country.”
There has so far been no independent confirmation of the government’s claims.
But Khidher Domle, a member of a reception committee for the Yazidis in the Kurdish town of Dohuk, told The Daily Telegraph: “The number of the Yazidis who were killed might be more than 500. They were killed in scattered groups. Women and children were also kidnapped from south of Mount Sinjar, specifically from Tel Qasab, Tel Banat, Qahtania, Mojamaa Al Jazeera.”
He said the killing was indiscriminate. “They are saying that it happened quickly and messily. It’s hard to know the total number of the victims, but what they are certain of is that it was quick killing to terrify the people, beside kidnapping entire families.”
One man, Khalil Shalal, 35, who escaped into Kurdistan, said: “I know the family of Barjas Nayis. They were 27 people. Islamic State killed eight men and kidnapped the rest, women and children.
“I was in the village of Khana Sour, near the Syrian boarders, when they attacked. I fled with my family to the mountain. We stayed on the mountain seven days and then we left on foot to Syria and from Syria to Sharya in Kurdistan. The journey lasted eight hours.”
In this handout image provided by the U.S. Department of Defense, Tech. Sgt. Lynn Morelly, 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, C-17 Globemaster III loadmaster, watches bundles of halal meals parachute to the ground during a humanitarian airdrop mission on August 9, 2014 over Iraq. To date, in coordination with the government of Iraq, U.S. military aircraft have delivered more than 52,000 meals and more than 10,600 gallons of fresh drinking water, providing much-needed aid to the displaced Yazidis, who urgently require emergency assistance. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Vernon Young Jr./U.S. Air Force via Getty Images)
Matthew Barber, a Middle East academic reporting from the ground in northern Iraq yesterday, said the deadline has been issued to families trapped in three villages held by Islamic State.
“Hearing multiple accounts of a convert-or-die ultimatum,” he said on Twitter. “Yazidis may die in the morning if resisting conversion,” he added.
Mr Barber, a graduate student from the University of Chicago, said the threat was made to families in settlements which have fallen under the control of Islamic State fundamentalists following the group’s incursions into northern Iraq.
“Spoke to Yazidi man who received call from daughter in Hatimiya one hour ago,” he wrote. “She says IS has given them until morning to convert or be killed.”
Islamic State has managed to carve out a self-declared caliphate across Syria and Iraq following a series of military victories which have been aided by the group’s self-declared willingness to behead captives and conduct mass executions, with photographs posted on the internet.
The group took over much of northern Iraq, including the northern city of Mosul in June and has made swift advances across Iraq, pushing through the defences of the Kurdish forces.
The United States, Britain and France have all responded by sending aid supplies, some via air drops to Mount Sinjar, while President Barack Obama has authorised air strikes to help the Kurdish forces drive the jihadists back.
It was welcomed by Kurdish forces who were able to push forward under American air cover yesterday.
There is little sign that that advance will reach Yazidi areas any time soon, even if it is successful. The Yazidis’ MP in the Iraqi parliament, Vian Dakhil, said on Saturday: “We have one or two days left to help these people. After that they will start dying en masse.”
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