'Islamic State' releases elderly Yazidis
January 18, 2015
The "Islamic State" (IS) terror militia group has released hundreds of Iraq's minority Yazidis on Saturday after holding them since August, officials and activists confirmed. Those freed were mostly elderly, disabled, or unwell, including some infants with serious illnesses.
The victims were freed on the edge of the city of Kirkuk and met by Kurdish peshmerga forces. Some were in wheelchairs and others were leaning on canes as Kurdish doctors and nurses ushered them to a health center for immediate medical attention. After moving from place to place for months, one of the freed Yazidis described being loaded in buses, where they were sure they would be executed, before being freed at the entrance of Kirkuk.
'They were a burden'
"IS must have decided that they could no longer feed them, look after them. They were a burden," Khodr Domli, a Yazidi rights activist, told AFP news agency from the Kurdish health center. Officials said the mass release, the largest of its kind, had taken them completely by surprise.
It is unknown exactly how many Yazidis have been kidnapped by IS since they began their reign of terror in Iraq and Syria last summer. But it is estimated that hundreds to thousands of Yazidi women and girls have been kidnapped and forced to marry militants or have been sold in sexual slavery.
One survivor told a peshmerga officer that he overhead the jihadists says they had 3,070 captives before Saturday's release, Reuters reported.
Kurdish forces succeeded in pushing IS back in northwestern Iraq last month, breaking the long siege of Sinjar mountain where thousands of Yazidis had been stranded for months, but many Yazidi villages remain under IS control.
es/bw (AFP, Reuters)