Yazidis "Take Revenge" Against Collaborators

As she approached the mosque, Zahra saw many other women and children from the village. “We went to the leader while his fellow fighters were taking pictures of us with their mobile phones,” she explains. “He promised us that nobody would hurt us but then he said we should leave the village immediately.”

Zahra began to move out of the village. It was chaos, she says. And she recalls seeing that while locals were leaving, they were often stopped by armed men who took their jewellery. “One of them, who looked extremely angry, told us that any woman that doesn’t obey his orders will be stripped naked,” she told NIQASH.

Spanish news agency, EFE, reports that an estimated 1,200 locals were forced out of their homes at gunpoint and that most of them were members of “the tribal clans of al-Jahish”.

“A tribal conflict took place a few weeks ago between al-Jahish clans and Yazidi fighters, after both parties accused each other of causing the displacement of the Yazidi population,” the agency also reported.

Because of the smoke rising from the two towns, other nearby locals saw there was something going on. But when they tried to approach the villages the armed men fired their guns; ten of the would-be rescuers were wounded.

“The looting and the vandalism continued for two long days,” says Majid Ali, who lives in one of the nearby villages and who is also a member of the same tribe that was attacked; a third village was also attacked. “We saw how they robbed all the cars, took the livestock and anything they could move. Cars were being driven from the two Arab villages full of the things they’d taken,” Ali told NIQASH.

During one of the nights, some of the members of the tribe managed to get into the villages that were attacked. They found unburied dead – including women, children and elderly people who had been executed, then burned. The attackers hadn’t buried the dead because they were afraid of being attacked themselves, Ali says.