Iraq: ISIS Massacres Hundreds More Yazidis, U.S Steps Up Airstrikes
ISIS has added another horrific notch to its belt in Iraq as the Islamic terrorist group continues its violent rampage across northern Iraq, decimating villages and the lives within.
Fox News reports the latest Iraq village to fall victim to an ISIS slaughter is Kawju, located south of the Iraqi village of Sinjar. A senior U.S. defense official said a U.S. surveillance drone found evidence of this latest ISIS massacre and ravaging of the village’s Yazidi population.
At least 90 Yazidi men appeared to be killed, while “dozens” of women and children were apparently kidnapped from the northern Iraq village made up of the Iraq Yazidi minority.
In the wake of the Kawju massacre, the United States carried out new airstrikes against the Islamic terrorist militants on Friday. According to the Fox News source, two ISIS targets were struck, killing some of those responsible for conducting the Yazidi executions in Kawju.
The Yazidi people are a Kurdish speaking ethnic and religious group that has been the unfortunate and regular target of the ISIS terror campaign in Iraq.
While there are several hundred thousand Yazidis in Iraq, those in the North have been in the path of ISIS with at least 500 killed and untold others kidnapped. Thousands more have been forced to flee, leavings their homes and villages behind with little more than the clothes on their backs.
When ISIS arrived in Kawju, their demands that the village’s residents convert to Islam were apparently not met.
“(ISIS militants) arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon,” said senior Kurdish official, Hoshiyar Zebari, to Reuters. “We believe it’s because of their creed: convert or be killed.”
A Yazidi lawmaker and another senior Kurdish official also confirmed that the killing of the Yazidi men, and the kidnapping of the women, had occurred.
According to other eyewitnesses, and fellow Yazidi Mahama Khalil who interviewed survivors, the massacre lasted for about an hour and followed a five day ultimatum to convert to Islam or die.
“(An ISIS member) told me that the Islamic State had spent five days trying to persuade villagers to convert to Islam and that a long lecture was delivered about the subject today,” a man from a nearby village told Reuters. “He then said the men were gathered and shot dead. The women and girls were probably taken to Tal Afar because that is where the foreign fighters are.”
The ISIS devastation in Kawju occurred on the heels of statements by President Obama that U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq had broken the Islamic terrorists’ siege that had trapped minority Christians and Yazidis on Mount Sinjar. President Obama also made it clear that the U.S. mission in Northern Iraq was not yet complete.
[Image via The Inquisitr]
