Air strikes in Iraq near militant-held Mosul dam after 'massacre'
The Islamic State group seized the dam on the Tigris river on August 7
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2014-08-16 16:55 GMT
Irbil: Airstrikes pounded the area around Iraq's largest dam on Saturday in an effort to drive out militants who captured it earlier this month, as reports emerged of the massacre of some 80 members of the Yazidi religious minority by Islamic extremists.
Residents living near the Mosul Dam told The Associated Press that the area was being targeted by airstrikes, but it was not immediately clear whether the attacks were being carried out by Iraq's air force or the U.S., which last week launched an air campaign aimed at halting the advance of the Islamic State group across the country's north.
The extremist group seized the dam on the Tigris River on Aug. 7. Residents near the dam say the airstrikes killed militants, but that could not immediately be confirmed. The residents spoke on condition of anonymity out of fears for their safety.
A Yazidi lawmaker and a Kurdish security official meanwhile said Islamic State fighters massacred scores of Yazidi men Friday afternoon after seizing the village of Kocho. Both said they based their information on the accounts of survivors and warned that the minority group remains in danger despite U.S. aid drops and airstrikes launched to protect them.
Islamic State fighters besieged the village for several days and gave its Yazidi residents a deadline to convert to Islam, Yazidi lawmaker Mahma Khalil said Saturday.
"When the residents refused to do this, the massacre took place," he said.
Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for Kurdish security forces, said the militants took the women and children of Kocho to the nearby city of Tal Afar, which is controlled by the Islamic State group. Their accounts could not immediately be confirmed. Areas held by the extremist group are not accessible to reporters.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled when the Islamic State group earlier this month captured the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border. The Yazidis practice an ancient religion that the Sunni Muslim radicals consider heretical.
The plight of the Yazidis, tens of thousands of whom were stranded on a desert mountaintop for days, encircled by the Islamic extremists, prompted the U.S. to launch aid lifts as well as airstrikes to help Kurdish fighters get them to safety.
Most of the Yazidis were eventually able to escape to Iraq's largely autonomous Kurdish region. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced by fighting since the Islamic State group's rapid advance across northern and western Iraq began in June.
The decision to launch airstrikes marked the first direct U.S. military intervention in Iraq since the last troops withdrew in 2011, and reflected growing international concern about the extremist group, which has carved out a self-styled Islamic state in large parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
On Saturday, Britain's Ministry of Defense said it deployed a U.S.-made spy plane over northern Iraq to monitor the humanitarian crisis and movements of Islamic State militants. It said the converted Boeing KC-135 tanker, called a Rivet Joint, would monitor mobile phone calls and other communication.
Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was in Baghdad on Saturday, where he announced his government would provide more than 24 million euros ($32.2 million) in humanitarian aid to Iraq.
"The first German air force planes are flying to Irbil at this moment to deliver humanitarian aid," Steinmeier said in a joint press conference with Iraq's acting Foreign Minister Hussein Shahristani.
"In the current situation where minorities, especially in northern Iraq, are expelled and murdered, where children are orphaned and women are enslaved, humanitarian aid is extremely important."
Two British planes also landed Saturday in the Kurdish regional capital Irbil carrying humanitarian supplies. Khalil, the Yazidi lawmaker, said the U.S. must do more to protect those fleeing the Islamic State group.
"We have been calling on the U.S. administration and Iraqi government to intervene and help the innocent people, but it seems that nobody is listening," Khalil said.
Jihadists 'massacre' Iraq villagers as world ups response
Details emerged 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. 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 Iraq's 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 the its north.
They hid there for days with little food or water. 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.
- 'Too late' -
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 village's 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. And EU ministers agreed at an emergency meeting in Brussels to back weapons deliveries to Iraqi Kurdish fighters who have been battling to halt the advance of the well-armed jihadists.
- Sunni awakening -
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in Iraq Saturday to meet officials and assess what help is needed. When jihadist forces began their Iraq offensive on June 9, Kurdish peshmerga forces initially fared better than retreating federal soldiers, but the US-made weaponry abandoned by government troops turned IS into an even more formidable foe.
They were able to sweep through the Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad in early June, encountering little effective resistance. Many in and outside Iraq say the Shiite-led government was partly to blame by pushing sectarian policies that have marginalised and radicalised the Sunni minority.
Outgoing premier Nuri al-Maliki was seen as an obstacle to any progress and his announcement on Thursday that he was abandoning his efforts to cling to power was welcomed with a sigh of relief at home and abroad. 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. Anbar was the birthplace of the Sahwa, or Awakening, movement of Sunni tribes that from late 2006 sided with US forces against their co-religionists in Al-Qaeda, helping turn the tide of that Sunni insurgency.