DOHUK,
Iraq — They ran from the sound of the Sunni militants’ guns in the
night last weekend, thousands of Yazidis fleeing miles on foot, carrying
almost nothing, to their holy sites on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, then collapsing amid the rocks and low scrub. Now they face a different danger.
“There is no water, nothing to eat, there is nowhere to sit, there is not even a shadow,” said one refugee, Jalal Shoraf Din.
Suleiman
Ilyas Aslan, who fled with his wife and their three children, said
makeshift funeral processions into the scrub wasteland on the
mountainside have become ever more common. “We couldn’t count them there
were so many,” said Mr. Aslan, who said he looked away when the
grieving families walked by.
The
Yazidis are a tiny religious minority, following a faith that is
neither Muslim nor Christian, and that makes them apostates in the eyes
of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which is sweeping through their villages in northern Iraq.
Some
of those who ran to the mountain did not make it, and no one yet has
numbered how many were executed by ISIS fighters over the past week. But
interviews with a half-dozen Yazidi families who had made their way
down from Mount Sinjar found that almost everyone had lost someone in
their extended family. Some were killed; others were abducted and faced
an unknown fate. Hundreds of women and young girls were taken away as
brides for jihadis and given the choice of conversion or death,
according to the refugees, several of whom said they had received phone
calls from their daughters or sisters, before their cellphone batteries
and credit ran out. The women said they were in a place near Mosul, the
new center for ISIS.
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For those who have stayed on the mountain, things are dire in a different way.
Airdrops
by the Iraqi government and by the Americans have reached a number of
the refugees, but the scale of the mountain, its many folds and
crevasses, means that those who fled are scattered across its scrabble
wastes.
The
Aslan family was one of four interviewed who never received water or
food from the airdrops although its members sometimes heard about the
packages from other families who were passing by and had managed to
receive some of the aid.
“These
people urgently need lifesaving assistance,” said David Swanson, a
spokesman for the United Nations’ Office of Coordination and
Humanitarian Aid in Iraq. “If we don’t get it up to them, the more
people will die; the more we wait, the more they die,” he said.
The
atmosphere now on the mountain is one desperation and exhaustion, said
those who were coming off it, dehydrated and confused. Many of those who
have made it down have bloodied and blistered feet and can barely
speak, not least because of all they have lost.
“I
don’t remember anything,” said Ilyas Haku Namo, 64, who was wearing
traditional Kurdish clothes, a turban and wide-legged pants that narrow
at the ankle. He arrived in Dohuk on Friday morning and was sitting
under a highway bridge. He had lost most of his family and feared they
were abducted by ISIS or dead.
“At
first we were running together, me and my first wife and my second wife
and my three children, two boys and a girl,” he said. “But then when we
got higher on the mountain, my three children and my first wife were
gone.
“I did nothing in my life except work and have this family,” he added, despairing. “I just want to die.”
In
the past 48 hours, the situation has become worse. Some refugees
reached by cellphone said they had heard gunshots and feared that ISIS
fighters might be moving onto the mountain — not necessarily to hunt the
Yazidis, but to fight the Syrian Kurdish pesh merga fighters who have
managed to make their way from Syria to the mountain, trying to assist in bringing people down.
The
Yazidis are caught up in a larger disaster occurring across Iraq, but
one that is hitting Kurdistan, once the most stable part of the country,
especially hard.
There,
a mass migration precipitated by increasingly widespread fears that the
Sunni militants are about to take one village after another across
northern Iraq, is underway, pouring some 580,00 refugees into the
Kurdistan region, about 200,000 since Monday when ISIS took Sinjar and
its surrounding villages, according to Mr. Swanson of the U.N.’s
humanitarian assistance office. They are there on top of another 230,000
Syrian refugees.
As
ISIS has moved steadily through the disputed areas along the border of
Iraqi Kurdistan that the Kurds are attempting to claim as part of their
region, civilians have fled into the Kurdistan region. In village after
village, town after town, people were running ahead of rumors that ISIS
was coming. The Kurdish forces offered to help people leave, piling them
into huge open trucks and handing out water before they set out for the
east or west with their tottering loads. Individuals in cars, pickup
trucks and farm vehicles with mattresses strapped on with old twine
hobbled along the bumpy roads just trying to get away. The old road to
Dohuk, which runs across Kurdistan, was filled with cars heading to
larger cities.
This
most recent exodus has involved primarily the minority Christians,
Yazidis, Shabaks, another Muslim sect, and Turkmen Shiites, all of whom
the Sunni militants view as heretics, as they do all Shiites.
The
particular fear for the Yazidis is that ISIS appears not only to be
displacing them and forcing conversions, but also killing a number of
them, much as they have Shiites in other parts of Iraq.
At
Mount Sinjar, some people are getting down with the help of the Syrian
Kurdish pesh merga who have been trying to lead people to safety. Some
350 people from the mountain arrived in Kurdistan on Saturday morning
after being rescued, brought into Syria and then traveling back into
Iraq.
Others
made their way down on their own, relying on their sense of the
mountain from years of worshiping on its slopes or in some cases herding
sheep and goats there. In some cases groups of women have come alone,
bringing their children while their men stayed on the mountain.
Mr.
Aslan and his family debated with several other families whether to
risk going down the mountain. They were not sure how far they would have
to walk or whether, when they reached the foot of the mountain, the
gunmen they were fleeing would be there, waiting to kill them.
After
four days without food and with only a few sips of water from shallow
springs — parents were spitting into their children’s mouths to try to
get them some liquid — Mr. Aslan’s wife Gerus Khalaf Aslan, said they
felt death would soon come to them.
“We decided to risk our children’s lives and try to escape,” she said.
The
mountain lies near the Syrian border and they managed to cross it with
the help of relatives who met them when they came off the mountain and
they then spent their last few dinars on a taxi back to the Kurdish city
of Dohuk — testament to how the borders have melted away in this
troubled region.
They
have spent the last 24 hours living under a highway bridge here,
uncertain where they should go or what they should do. Local Kurds have
brought them mattresses, bread and cookies and some are bringing cooked
food, but their children want desperately to go home.
“We
thought ISIS would only stay a short time in our village and we thought
the Kurdish fighters would succeed in beating back ISIS,” said Mrs.
Aslan, explaining that their village had been defended by pesh merga
soldiers.
“But they used up all their bullets,” she said, looking down.
Her husband nodded and said: “We will never go back to our village or we will die.”
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