Airstrikes pounded the area around Iraq’s largest dam yesterday in an effort to drive out extremists who captured it earlier this month, as reports emerged of the alleged massacre of about 80 members of the Yazidi religious minority by the extremists.
Residents living near the Mosul Dam said that the area was being targeted in airstrikes, but that it was not clear whether they were being carried out by Iraq’s air force or the US, which last week began strikes aimed at halting the advance of the Islamic State group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), across the country’s north.
The group seized the dam on the Tigris River on Aug. 7.
Photo: AFP
Residents nearby say the strikes killed extremists, but that could not immediately be confirmed.
The residents spoke on condition of anonymity out of fears for their safety.
Meanwhile, a Yazidi lawmaker and a Kurdish security official said the Islamic State massacred scores of Yazidi men on 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.
Islamic State fighters besieged the village for days and gave Yazidi residents a deadline to convert to Islam, Yazidi lawmaker Mahma Khalil said yesterday.
“When the residents refused to do this, the massacre took place,” he said.
Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for Kurdish security forces, on Friday night said that the militants took the women and children of Kocho to the nearby city of Tal Afar, which is controlled by the Islamic State group.
Kocho, like other areas held by the extremist group, is not accessible to journalists.
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 US to launch aid lifts.
About 1.5 million people have been displaced since the Islamic State’s rapid advance across Iraq began in June.
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