Dehydration or massacre: Thousands caught in ISIS chokehold
August 10, 2014 -- Updated 1532 GMT (2332 HKT)
Source: CNN
Last week, the mountains
saw another influx, as tens of thousands of people tried to escape the
rapid advance of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which now
calls itself the Islamic State. Many of them were Yazidis, fleeing the
town of Sinjar and surrounding villages in convoys of dozens of
vehicles. The lucky ones used smuggling routes to cross into Syria and
back into Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq. The less fortunate
were either seized by ISIS militants or headed into the mountains.
The Yazidi are an ancient
religious sect -- mainly ethnic Kurds -- that worship an angel figure
held by many Muslims to be the devil. ISIS has executed Yazidis who
refuse to convert to its extreme ideology.
By Sunday, according to
Iraqi and Kurdish sources, as many as 20,000 had been able to leave the
mountains -- perhaps half of those who had been stranded for nearly a
week. U.N. agencies estimated late last week there were as many as
50,000 people in the mountains.
Kurdish peshmerga forces
appear to have secured an escape route, but a hazardous one with ISIS
militants still roaming the area. According to some accounts, Syrian
Kurds also helped people use parts of northeastern Syria under their
control to reach Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
U.S. airstrikes Saturday
against several armored personnel carriers used by ISIS in the area may
have helped the escape. But President Obama acknowledged Saturday that
securing safe passage for those still stranded would be "logistically
complicated."
Donatella Rovera of
Amnesty International, who is in the region, spoke Sunday of families
that had escaped, arriving in the town of Fishkhabour after a circuitous
trek through Syria "in terrible condition, fainting from exhaustion."
Some had told her that ISIS had abducted women and girls.
Unless food and water
reach those remaining, mainly on the southern slopes, they have an
impossible choice between dying of dehydration and giving themselves up
to ISIS. Daytime temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit).
Video of a Kurdish relief mission
showed a helicopter landing with supplies on a barren scarp. Hundreds
of desperate people ran toward it. Twenty lucky ones were able to
scramble aboard for the return flight, many of them hysterical. A few
dozen more have been picked up by Iraqi helicopters, which have also
been bringing aid to the mountains.
Photographs from last
week showed thousands of people abandoning their vehicles before
trekking to higher altitudes, carrying what they could. On the northern
side of the range, Christians were also fleeing, as ISIS fighters pushed
toward the mountains from two directions. A few took refuge in caves,
according to those who have escaped. Many more wandered the
boulder-strewn slopes.
The U.S. Air Force has
carried out three relief drops on successive nights since Thursday,
which have included some 50,000 ready-to-eat meals. Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel said the Pentagon had "pretty solid information" that of the
72 bundles dropped by C-17 and C-130 aircraft in the first mission,
more than 60 had reached "the people who were trapped up there."
Two more U.S. airdrops
followed, the latest on Saturday night, as well as one by the Royal Air
Force. The U.N. Children's Fund -- UNICEF -- estimates that at least 20
flights would be needed to keep the thousands trapped alive for a week.
France is also planning aid drops.
Crossroads of conflict
The Yazidis settled in
the area around Sinjar in the 12th century. The mountains on which they
now suffer had a special place in their beliefs. Yazidi tradition held
that Noah's Ark had come to rest on the summit.
As a minority, they are
no strangers to conflict and persecution. Through the ages, cultures,
religions and ethnicities have competed and clashed in this part of
Iraq. In the early 19th century, the Kurds, Arabs and Yazidis all had
different names for Sinjar. Kurdish fighters invaded Yazidi lands,
killing hundreds.
Frederick Forbes, a
British colonial officer who visited the area in 1838, said the Yazidis
had "kept the whole of the country between Mosul and Nisibin in a state
of alarm" until being "pacified" by the Ottoman Empire.
When he reached the town
of Sinjar, Forbes found a fertile place fed by mountain streams, but
the "ruins of many Mohammedan buildings" recalled earlier battles.
Another colonial
visitor, Gertrude Bell, wrote in the 1920s that "until a couple of years
ago the Yezidis were ceaselessly at war with the Arabs and with
everybody else."
Everybody else included
the Turkish army, which had tried to force the Yazidis to convert to
Islam in the last few years of the 19th century, a story told by the
traveler Oswald Hutton Parry in his "Six Months in a Syrian Monastery,"
written in 1895.
After the Yazidis had
been told to convert, Parry wrote, "none responded. Christianity they
were less unready to accept; the Christians were their friends and
fellow-sufferers. Islam had always cursed and persecuted them." So the
Sultan sent troops commanded by his son to Yazidi villages. "The
soldiers slew in all some five hundred men. ... The pretty women and
girls he took captive, marrying them by force to his soldiers."
The Yazidis did indeed
see Christians as fellow sufferers. A hundred years ago, they helped
Armenian Christians fleeing Turkey to settle in the shadow of the Sinjar
Mountains, along with Chaldean and Syriac Catholics. But in the spring
of 1918, Turkish forces arrived and destroyed the settlement as well as
many Yazidi homes.
For a while after the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Yazidis were unsure whether they
would end up as part of Iraq or Syria. Eventually, in 1933, an
international commission placed Sinjar inside Iraq -- a decision by
colonial overlords that would later haunt the Yazidis. During Saddam
Hussein's rule, many of their settlements were razed and their
inhabitants forced into "collective villages" as a buffer against the
troublesome Kurds.
As Matthew Barber writes in the blog Syria Comment,
"Saddam bulldozed countless Yazidi towns until there was nothing left
but gravel, and then forcibly moved their former inhabitants into
collectives situated in locations that served his strategic interests."
At least one of those collectives saw its population swell with refugees
from Sinjar in recent days.
Even after Hussein was
overthrown, there was little peace for the Yazidis. Relations with Sunni
Arabs remained tense, and after a 17-year old Yazidi girl in the town
of Bashika was suspected of having a relationship with a Sunni teenager,
extremists murdered more than 20 Yazidis. The girl was stoned to death by her own relatives for daring to have an "impure relationship" -- a so-called honor killing.
At the time, the region
was a stronghold of al Qaeda in Iraq and a conduit for militants
arriving from Syria to fight U.S. forces. Suicide bombings in August
2007 targeted Yazidi communities in and around the town of Qahataniya,
killing nearly 200 people.
One U.S. military raid
near Sinjar in October of that year uncovered hundreds of al Qaeda
documents listing foreign fighters who had passed through the area.
Now another -- much more
powerful -- surge of Islamist militancy threatens the existence of one
of the Middle East's most vulnerable peoples.
Yazidi survivor recalls horror of evading ISIS
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