IN IRAQ, JIHADIS MASSACRE YAZIDI MEN AND WOMEN AS SLAVES AFTER A CALL TO CONVERT OR LEAVE: Village of Kocho: Details emerged on Saturday of a massacre carried out by jihadists in a northern Iraq village, as world powers ramped up efforts to cut their funding, arm Kurds battling them and assist those they displaced. Dozens of civilians were killed, most of them followers of the Yazidi faith, officials said as the Islamic State group fighters pressed their offensive against minority groups in the north. This is after the massacre of 150 men just few days ago in Tappa. Militants entered the village of Kocho on Friday and committed a massacre, senior Iraqi official Hoshyar Zebari told AFP, citing sources from the region and intelligence reports. Around 80 of them have been killed, he said. A senior official of one of Iraqs main Kurdish parties said 81 people had lost their lives, while a Yazidi activist said the death toll could be even higher. The village lies near the northwestern town of Sinjar, which the jihadists stormed on August 3 sending tens of thousands of civilians, many of them Yazidi Kurds, fleeing into the mountains to its north.They hid there for days with little food or water. Massacre in Tappa: 150 men, women and children were herded into lines for their final stand in the searing sun. Their executioners, bearded and black-clad men who waved flags bearing the seal of the Prophet Mohammed, killed in an industrial fashion, spraying bullets into the crowd with the nonchalance of those who believe that murder is blessed by Allah. Only one man from this group escaped. He had fallen under bodies dropping around him, the corpses of his friends and relatives shielding him from the bullets. For two hours he waited underneath the grim canopy until he was sure that the killers had gone. Then he ran up the mountain to join the thousands of other Yazidis waiting out a slow death by thirst and starvation. He filled in the terrible details of the story for the people who had heard the gunshots and feared the worst. Those who had stayed in Tappa had done so out of a faith in humanity, coupled with a pure exhaustion that stopped them from running any further. They had done nothing wrong, they reasoned, and so had nothing to fear. They were reassured further when Islamic State fighters came to them with a local man acting as translator. “All will be OK,” the man told them. “No one is going to kill you.” When more fighters arrived, heavily armed and aggressive, and began lining them up in rows, they realised their faith had been misplaced. The translator had been forced to lie to them; they had been tricked into queuing up for their own execution. “Most of the people who stayed down there were my relatives,” said Ismail. “Cousins and second cousins. My father’s cousin lost 36 people from his family in that massacre. There used to be 40 of them.” Ismail left his 80-year-old mother to her fate at the Amadin Shrine on the mountaintop. Hopeless and exhausted, she couldn’t walk any further. He does not know whether she and the two elderly women with her are alive. Ismail’s eyes filled up as he described their final goodbye. “We kissed each other, and I told her that maybe this will be the last time we see each other,” he said. “And then she told me to be safe, and that God would be with us.” Fear of an impending genocide against the Yazidi minority, whose faith is anathema to the Sunni Muslim extremists, was one of the reasons Washington cited for air strikes it began on August 8. US President Barack Obama declared the Mount Sinjar siege over on Thursday but vulnerable civilians remain in areas taken by the jihadists, including Yazidi Kurds. In Kocho, Zebari said the jihadists took their revenge on its inhabitants, who happened to be mostly Yazidis who did not flee their homes. Human rights groups and residents say IS fighters have demanded that villagers in the Sinjar area convert or leave, unleashing violent reprisals on any who refused. Mohsen Tawwal, a Yazidi fighter, said he saw a large number of bodies in Kocho. We made it into a part of Kocho village, where residents were under siege, but we were too late, he told AFP by telephone. There were corpses everywhere. We only managed to get two people out alive. The rest had all been killed. A Kurdish official said the militants had taken the villages women to prisons they control. The Pentagon announced that US drones had struck an IS convoy leaving the village on Friday after receiving reports that residents were under attack. The outcome of the latest US strike was not immediately clear. Amnesty International, which has been documenting mass abductions in the Sinjar area, says thousands of Yazidis have been kidnapped by IS since it launched its offensive in the region on August 3. Members of the Christian, Turkmen and other minorities have also been affected by the violence. In New York, the UN security council unanimously adopted a resolution aimed at weakening the jihadists, who control large areas of neighbouring Syria as well as of Iraq. The resolution calls on all member states to take national measures to suppress the flow of foreign terrorist fighters and threatens sanctions against anyone involved in their recruitment. In another potentially game-changing development, 25 Sunni tribes in the western province of Anbar, including some that had previously been on the fence, announced on Friday that they were launching a coordinated effort to oust IS fighters. This popular revolution was agreed on with all the tribes that want to fight IS, which spilled our blood, one of their leaders, Sheikh Abduljabbar Abu Risha, told AFP. sources:timesofindia.indiatimes/,theaustralian.au/ Images show condition of Yazidis in Iraq during various offensives against them by IS.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 02:08:54 +0000
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