Baghdad: Details emerged on Saturday of a “massacre” carried out by Islamist militants in a northern Iraq village. Dozens of civilians were killed, most of them followers of the Yazidi faith, officials said as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) militants 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 north.
They hid there for days with little food or water.
Fear of an impending genocide against the Yazidi minority 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 militats, including Yazidi Kurds.
In Kocho, Zebari said the militants “took their revenge on its inhabitants, who happened to be mostly Yazidis who did not flee their homes”.
Human rights groups and residents say Isil militants have demanded that villagers in the Sinjar area convert or leave, unleashing violent reprisals on any who refused.
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.”
Amnesty International, which has been documenting mass abductions in the Sinjar area, says thousands of Yazidis have been kidnapped by Isil 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.
