As Islamic State’s conversion deadline ends, men shot, some buried alive
In a development that has sent alarm bells ringing around the world, an Iraqi Government Minister told reporters on Sunday that Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, burying some alive and taking hundreds of women as slaves.
The Yazidis are a tiny religious minority, following a faith that is neither Muslim nor Christian. That makes them apostates in the eyes of Islamist fighters who are sweeping through villages across northern Iraq. Human Rights Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani accused the Sunni Muslim insurgents, who have ordered the community they regard as “devil worshippers” to convert to Islam or die, of celebrating a “a vicious atrocity” with cheers and weapons waved in the air.
Islamic State’s advance through northern Iraq has forced tens of thousands to flee, threatened the Capital of the Kurdish autonomous region and provoked the first US air strikes in the area since Washington withdrew troops from Iraq in late 2011. Sudani said in a telephone interview that news of the killings had come from people who had escaped town of Sinjar, an ancient home of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking community.
“We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic State have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar,” he said.
“Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar.”
In comments likely to put pressure on Washington to step up its response to Islamic State, Sudani said: “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.
“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 added. “This is a vicious atrocity.” A deadline passed at midday on Sunday for 300 families from the Yazidi community to convert to Islam or die. It was not immediately clear if the victims to whom the Minister referred were from that group of families.
Meanwhile, France’s Foreign Minister said on Sunday that his country was prepared to join multinational efforts to provide aid to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Iraqis and called upon leaders in Baghdad to unite against the Sunni militants.
Speaking at a Press conference with Iraq’s acting Foreign Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, laurent Fabius said his visit was aimed at boosting humanitarian efforts in northern Iraq, where tens of thousands of Christians and Yazidis have fled into the mountains and even into neighbouring Syria to escape the extremist Islamic State group.The French diplomat also met with Iraq’s embattled Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki before travelling north to the Kurdish regional capital Irbil. The US conducted new air strikes on Islamic State targets near Arbil, the US Central Command said on Sunday.
The strikes, launched by drone aircraft and US fighter jets, were aimed at protecting Kurdish Peshmerga forces as they face off against Islamist militants near Arbil, the site of a US consulate and a US-Iraqi joint military operations centre, Central Command said in a statement.“US aircraft struck and destroyed an (Islamic State) armed truck that was firing on Kurdish forces located in the approaches to Arbil,” Central Command said. Four other strikes on armed trucks and a mortar position followed, it said.
US Central Command said the Islamic State militants were firing indiscriminately on members of the Yazidi and Christian minorities taking shelter in the mountains outside the town of Sinjar. US and Iraqi aircraft have also dropped aid for the Yazidis, thousands of whom have been stranded on a scorching mountaintop since the Islamic militants seized Sinjar last week.
Meanwhile, in an alarming development, militants from groups affiliated with once feared al-Qaeda network are abandoning their outfits to join the Islamist State. “Small groups from a number of al-Qaeda affiliates have defected to ISIS,” as the group is also known, the Washington Post reported, citing a US official with access to classified Intelligence assessments.
“And this problem will probably become more acute as ISIS continues to rack up victories.” The paper said the influx has strengthened the Islamic State. Citing US officials, the paper said the defections to the Islamic State have “come primarily from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group that has launched several bombing plots targeting the US, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which had seized territory in northern Mali before facing strikes carried out by France last year.”
“It’s not to the point where it’s causing splintering within the affiliates,” said the senior US counterterrorism official. But the defections have accelerated in recent months, officials said, and also involve fighters from groups in libya and elsewhere that are not formally part of al-Qaeda.