By Jaime Ortega.
Families turned into pariahs
Kocho, a village of 1,700 residents, was conquered on August 3 by extremists in an offensive that has swept all the neighboring villages. About 150,000 people have fled since immemorial times inhabited by Yazidis, adherents of a pre-Islamic religion to the jihadists as “devil worshipers” zone.
Having become outcasts, families have survived for days in the mountains without water or food, or have persisted for thrown by American, British and Iraqi aircraft supplies. In the village of Khaled, however, there was no option to sneak the enemy. “No resistance opposed. When they got all the weapons we gave to them. They said they would do us no harm,” recalls Young.
But the promise evaporated on August 15. Within hours, the situation turned dramatically. “We were confined in high schools and separated us. Women and children were on the first floor. Men we moved to the second. We withdrew the money, mobile phones and documents,” Khaled tells . Soon after, began their macabre vans to roam the streets of Kocho. “They were loaded with up to 40 men.’s Shot in different but very close to town center locations,” says the survivor, who wounded walked for nine hours through the mountains of Sinjar to give the troops the PKK (Kurdistan Workers ) and ‘peshmerga’ (army of Iraqi Kurdistan).
The ultimatum of the captors
The fate of women and children abducted by the IS is also vague. “Sometimes we get a call from a kidnapped woman. Terrorists so far have not had much to do with them. But they are forcing girls from other villages to marry militants,” Khaled said. The brutality with which the acolytes of the caliphate have acted in other villas has frozen any hope. In the town of Siba, women made prisoners ate Sunday after severe ultimatums directed by their captors. “I have said that if not converted to Islam no one can help,” said Gazal Murad between rudimentary tents scattered throughout a barren hill in Zakho.
His daughter and two grandchildren are held for more than half a week at a school in Tal Afar, transformed in a prison for the IS. “The last time I talked to her on the phone she was frightened. Today (yesterday) is the last day which grant you to embrace Islam. Otherwise, they’ll kill her,” said the old woman.
A few meters away, in a shed built with iron and blankets also Jameel Maskin -oriundo of Siba- impassively tells his brother he was arrested by the bearded entrances to the village. “I knew he had died of a video posted by the IS” as he could have saved his life and that of her children only to seek refuge in the mountains and-after days of hunger and thirsty down in the corridor to Syria opened by Kurdish militias .
“It’s the 74th genocide suffered by the Yezidi people. being the worst,” laments Yamil, eager to emigrate somewhere else. Khaled Barrunta wont go home when recovered. “Among those recognized were shooting four Arabs from a nearby village., We can not go back. Just want to get out of Iraq.”
