IraqISIS militants kill 500 Yezidis, burying women and children alive, forcing 300 women into slavery

Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, Iraq’s human rights minister, on Sunday told Reuters that Islamic State (ISIS) militants have killed 500 members of the Yazidi ethnic minority, including some women and children who were buried alive. Another 300 women were kidnapped and forced into slavery.

“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,” Sudani was quoted as saying.

“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,” he added. “We are afraid they will take them outside the country.”

Early last week Islamic State militants captured Sinjar and other ancient hometowns of the Yazidis, a religious group regarded by Islamist jihadists as “devil worshipers.” About 40,000 Yazidis fled to nearby Mount Sinjar, seeking refuge on the barren slopes without food or water supplies. The ISIS militants have been besieging the refugees to prevent supplies from reaching them and close off escape routes. The militants say that the 40,000 refugees have a choice – convert to Islam or perish.

Al-Sudani added that “Some of the victims, including women and children, were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar. 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. This is a vicious atrocity.”

Times of Israel reports that Sudani appealed to the international community to help defeat the Islamic militants before they spread beyond Iraq.

“The international community should submit to the fact that the atrocities of the Islamic State will not stop in Iraq and could be repeated somewhere else if no urgent measures are taken to neutralize this terrorist group,” he said.

Since Thursday night, the U.S. military has been dropping supplies to the besieged Yezidis. At the same time, the U.S. Air Force has been bombing ISIS targets and forward units in order to relieve the militants’ pressure on Kurdish peshmerga forces. Late last week, the overstretched and under-armed Kurdish forces retreated east from their forward positions, allowing ISIS forces to take over the towns in which hundreds of thousands of Yezidis and Christians live – and from which tens of thousands have already escaped.

The U.S. strategy is to weaken the forward units of ISIS by bombing them from the air, and force them back toward their positions in the wet — thus allowing the Kurdish forces time and space to regroup and move back to area where they can protect the Yezidis and Christians.

On Sunday, a senior Kurdish military official said his forces had retaken two towns from the Sunni militants who have seized large parts of northern Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Shirko Fatih said the Kurdish fighters were able to push the militants of the Islamic State group out of the villages of Makhmour and al-Gweir.

Analysts say that the retaking of the two towns in Nineveh province is significant because it is the first victory by the Kurdish forces in a while, following a series of Kurdish retreats in the face of better-equipped ISIS forces.