Plight of Iraqi Minorities Worsens With Forced Conversions and Killings

BAGHDAD - The extremist gunmen had surrounded the village for more than a week, refusing to let residents leave and insisting that they convert to Islam.

A handful did, and when the village's elders found out that they had abandoned the community's Yazidi faith, they killed them.

That news enraged the fighters from the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, 'so they stormed the village and started killing its people,' said Hassan Khidr, a resident reached by telephone who managed to flee after the killings began.

The extent of the killings on Friday in Kocho, a small, isolated village near the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, remained unclear Saturday night, although some residents and Iraqi officials said they believed that scores of people had died at the hands of ISIS.

The killings are likely to heighten international concern about the plight of Iraq's Yazidi minority, tens of thousands of whose members have fled their homes and villages under the threat of attack from ISIS.

In recent months, ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State and seeks to create a caliphate, or government for all the world's Muslims, had expanded the area it controls in northern and eastern Iraq, clashing both with Iraqi security forces and Kurdish militias.

Alarm at the group's rapid growth - and at the humanitarian suffering it has unleashed - led President Obama to launch airstrikes on ISIS positions.

ISIS' ideology, which considers all who do not accept its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam heretics, has proved to be a particularly destructive force in Iraq, home to a range of ethnic and religious groups, including the Yazidis killed Friday.

Mr. Khidr spoke by telephone from a hospital. He said had been detained by ISIS fighters with other men inside a school when the killings began.

He had played dead, he said, until he had an opportunity to flee, and saw a number of bodies as he was leaving.

A prominent member of a local Arab tribe told a similar story, saying ISIS had surrounded two Yazidi villages and given people there 10 days to convert to Islam. Residents of one village had managed to flee, said the man, who gave only his first name, Abdel-Rahman, because he feared retribution by the militants.

'But the time ran out for Kocho, so the gunmen from the Islamist State stormed it and killed their men,' he said.

It remained unclear what had become of the village's women and children. Mr. Khadr said he did not think they had been killed, but had been rounded up and taken somewhere else.

Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for Kurdish security forces, said the militants took the women and children to the nearby city of Tal Afar, said.

Elsewhere in northern Iraq, airstrikes hit near the insurgent-held city of Mosul early Saturday, easing the mounting tension felt by the Kurdish forces trying to hold the Sunni militants at bay.

The strikes landed near the Mosul Dam, which militants claimed more than a week ago, in addition to at least one other area in the hinterlands between militant and government control. Hospital officials in Mosul said that the strikes killed at least 11 ISIS militants.

The Kurdish forces have been pushed back to operating bases on several fronts in recent weeks, including Khazir, where airstrikes occurred in the early hours of Saturday along the hills in front of rebel-held territory.

'This has become a frontline in the battle against ISIS,' said Mohammad Mohsin Ahmedi, an assistant to Rowsch Nuri Shaways, the country's deputy minister, who was visiting the area on Saturday. 'The airstrikes and support we have received from the international community has been very useful in our efforts to stop the ISIS advance.'

Officials described the area as a crucial point along the road to Erbil, in northern Iraq.

'If anyone breaks through this line, then that's Erbil,' said Azizi Shwan Ahmed, the chief of staff in the Mr. Rowsch's office. 'This is defending the capital directly.'

The officials said that airstrikes have been semi-regular in the last few days, and are not always a response to an imminent advance by the Sunni fighters. On Saturday morning, for instance, the Kurdish fighters in the area said they did not call for the attack or even see a militant push to prompt them.

'It wasn't because they were advancing,' Mr. Ahmedi said. 'When the planes see ISIS movement they stop it.'

Outside of the headquarters, where several commanders and local politicians gathered Saturday afternoon, the Kurdish fighters scanned the horizon from their forward bases. The fighters said that they sleep during the day and are awake at night, when most of the shooting from the militants happens. The village of Hasan Sham, where the Sunni militants operate openly, sat a few miles away.

Officials said there were no imminent plans to capitalize on the air assaults, as has been the case in other areas following strikes.

The landscape nearby was filled with refugee tents that until roughly 10 days ago were filled with minorities fleeing ISIS fighters. They now sit empty, their white tarps forming tidy rows along the side of a hill. In the last week, those refugees have continued their flight to safety.

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