The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

IS frees around 350 Yazidi captives in Iraq’s north

Kirkuk, Iraq: The so-called Islamic State freed around 350 members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority on Saturday, delivering them to safety in the country’s Kurdish north.

Almost all those released were elderly, disabled, or unwell, and included several infants with serious illnesses, according to a Reuters reporter who saw them arrive in the Kurdish-controlled city of Kirkuk.

Officials said the mass release, the largest of its kind, took them by surprise and said there had been no co-ordination with IS.

“IS must have decided that they could no longer feed them, look after them. They were a burden,” said Khodr Domli, a leading Yazidi rights activist.

IS militants attacked Yazidis in north-west Iraq last summer, killing or capturing and enslaving thousands of the minority group.

Those who could fled to the autonomous Kurdistan region, where many are living in camps along with other religious and ethnic minorities as well as Sunni Muslims displaced by the Islamist militants.

One of the freed Yazidis, who was in his 70s, said IS fighters had ordered them to get into buses on Saturday, and they feared they were going to be executed.

Instead, they were driven to the IS-controlled Shirqat area, where they spent the night, and from there to Hawija at the south-western entrance of Kirkuk.

Kurdish peshmerga forces drove back IS militants in north-western Iraq last month, breaking a long siege of Sinjar mountain, where thousands of Yazidis had been stranded for months. But many Yazidi villages remain under IS control.

In Syria, Kurdish forces battled on Saturday with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, breaking a longstanding tacit agreement between the two sides to focus on other enemies in the country’s complex civil war.

Violence broke out when army soldiers and allied militiamen took control of buildings in an area that both sides had agreed would stay demilitarised, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

“There has been some serious fighting today. The PYD [the political wing of the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia] arrested 10 soldiers and Baath Party gunmen,” Observatory head Rami Abdulrahman said. “There is now fighting in many areas of Hassakeh [a north-eastern province of Syria].”

The army shelled three Kurdish-majority areas on the edges of Hassakeh city, and fighters from the YPG clashed with Syrian forces inside the city throughout the day, the YPG said on its website.

Reuters, AFP

 

http://www.smh.com.au/world/is-frees-around-350-yazidi-captives-in-iraqs-north-20150118-12so17.html