Fishkhabour, Iraq: Amid the low scrub on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, new piles of loose stones mark a bleak landscape: makeshift graves for scores, perhaps hundreds, of Yazidis, left behind by survivors desperate to find an escape from the Sunni militant fighters chasing them.
The lucky ones make it here, to this desolate outpost on the Iraqi border, after skirting through Syrian territory to evade their tormentors and crossing a tributary to the Tigris River over a narrow bridge.
Most fled miles on foot a week ago toward the Yazidi holy sites that dot the mountain, carrying almost nothing with them as they ran from the Sunni militants of the Islamic State group. But the mountain that at first seemed a safe haven quickly became a place of danger.
Suleiman Ilyas Aslan, who fled with his wife and their three children, said many of the elderly had become too weak to walk and were being hoisted onto their relatives' backs. His younger daughter is blind, "so my wife and I walked on either side and we had to lift her over the roots and rocks," he said.
No one yet has numbered how many were executed by Islamic State fighters over the past week, in a campaign that President Barack Obama called potential genocide. But interviews with a dozen Yazidi families who had made their way down Mount Sinjar found that almost everyone had lost someone in their extended family.
Airdrops by the Iraqi government and by the Americans have reached a number of the refugees, but the scale of the mountain, its many folds and crevasses, means that the refugees are scattered across miles of scrabble wastes. The Aslan family was one of a half dozen interviewed who never received water or food from the airdrops, although its members sometimes heard about the packages from other families.
The atmosphere now on the mountain is one of desperation and exhaustion, said those who were coming off it, dehydrated and confused. Many who have made it down have bloodied and blistered feet and can barely speak, not least because of all they have lost.
"At first we were running together, me and my first wife and my second wife and my three children, two boys and a girl," he said. "But then when we got higher on the mountain, my three children and my first wife were gone.
On Saturday, the trickle of those coming down the mountain earlier in the week became a flood. Refugees described how Kurdish peshmerga fighters from Syria, along with some Yazidi fighters, had cleared a new path down to the Syrian border, beating back Islamic State fighters who have begun to move up the mountain. The opening allowed thousands to get down, and police and customs workers at the Fishkhabour crossing estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 Yazidis, almost all from Mount Sinjar, had come through.
The Yazidis are caught up in a larger disaster occurring across Iraq, but one that is hitting Iraqi Kurdistan, once the most stable part of the country, especially hard.
There, a mass migration, precipitated by increasingly widespread fears about the Sunni militants' advance, is underway. It has poured about 580,000 refugees into the Kurdistan region, about 200,000 since Monday when the Islamic State took Sinjar and its surrounding villages, according to Swanson of the U.N. humanitarian assistance office. They are there on top of another 230,000 Syrian refugees.
As the Islamic State has moved steadily through the disputed areas along the border of Iraqi Kurdistan, civilians have fled into the region.
In village after village, town after town, people were running ahead of rumors that the Islamic State was coming. The Kurdish forces offered to help people leave, piling them into huge open trucks and handing out water before they set out for the east or west with their tottering loads. Individuals in cars, pickup trucks and farm vehicles with mattresses strapped on with old twine hobbled along the bumpy roads just trying to get away. The old road to Dohuk, which runs across Kurdistan, was filled with cars heading to larger cities.
This most recent exodus has involved primarily the minority Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, another Muslim sect, and Turkmen Shiites, all of whom the Sunni militants view as heretics, as they do all Shiites.
The particular fear for the Yazidis is that the Islamic State appears not only to be displacing them and forcing conversions, but also especially targeting them for death.
Until the Yazidi fighters and the Syrian peshmerga opened a route, only small numbers were making it down on their own, relying on their sense of the mountain from years of worshiping on its slopes or in some cases herding sheep and goats there. In some cases, groups of women have come alone, bringing their children while their men stayed on the mountain, some to help the Yazidi fighters.
Aslan and his family debated with several other families whether to risk going down the mountain. They were not sure how far they would have to walk or whether, when they reached the foot of the mountain, the gunmen they were fleeing would be there, waiting to kill them. When the Islamic State took the area around Sinjar they cut off routes that would have allowed the Yazidis to go around the mountain and reach the road into Iraqi Kurdistan, effectively driving the Yazidis into the mountain wastes.
After four days without food and with only a few sips of water from shallow springs - parents were spitting into their children's mouths to try to get them some liquid - Aslan's wife, Gerus Khalaf Aslan, said they felt death would soon come to them.
"We decided to risk our children's lives and try to escape," she said.
They were amazed to find that after walking only an hour and a half beyond where they were, they were nearly in Syria and they managed to cross with the help of relatives who met them when they came off the mountain. They then spent their last few dinars on a taxi back to the Kurdish city of Dohuk - testament to how the borders have melted away in this troubled region.
They have spent the last 24 hours living under a highway bridge here, uncertain where they should go or what they should do. Local Kurds have brought them mattresses, bread and cookies and some are bringing cooked food, but their children want desperately to go home.
"We thought ISIS would only stay a short time in our village and we thought the Kurdish fighters would succeed in beating back ISIS," said Gerus Aslan, explaining that their village had been defended against Islamic State fighters by peshmerga soldiers.
"But they used up all their bullets," she said, looking down.
Her husband nodded and said: "We can never go back to our village, or we will die."
The lucky ones make it here, to this desolate outpost on the Iraqi border, after skirting through Syrian territory to evade their tormentors and crossing a tributary to the Tigris River over a narrow bridge.
Most fled miles on foot a week ago toward the Yazidi holy sites that dot the mountain, carrying almost nothing with them as they ran from the Sunni militants of the Islamic State group. But the mountain that at first seemed a safe haven quickly became a place of danger.
Suleiman Ilyas Aslan, who fled with his wife and their three children, said many of the elderly had become too weak to walk and were being hoisted onto their relatives' backs. His younger daughter is blind, "so my wife and I walked on either side and we had to lift her over the roots and rocks," he said.
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No one yet has numbered how many were executed by Islamic State fighters over the past week, in a campaign that President Barack Obama called potential genocide. But interviews with a dozen Yazidi families who had made their way down Mount Sinjar found that almost everyone had lost someone in their extended family.
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Airdrops by the Iraqi government and by the Americans have reached a number of the refugees, but the scale of the mountain, its many folds and crevasses, means that the refugees are scattered across miles of scrabble wastes. The Aslan family was one of a half dozen interviewed who never received water or food from the airdrops, although its members sometimes heard about the packages from other families.
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The atmosphere now on the mountain is one of desperation and exhaustion, said those who were coming off it, dehydrated and confused. Many who have made it down have bloodied and blistered feet and can barely speak, not least because of all they have lost.
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"At first we were running together, me and my first wife and my second wife and my three children, two boys and a girl," he said. "But then when we got higher on the mountain, my three children and my first wife were gone.
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On Saturday, the trickle of those coming down the mountain earlier in the week became a flood. Refugees described how Kurdish peshmerga fighters from Syria, along with some Yazidi fighters, had cleared a new path down to the Syrian border, beating back Islamic State fighters who have begun to move up the mountain. The opening allowed thousands to get down, and police and customs workers at the Fishkhabour crossing estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 Yazidis, almost all from Mount Sinjar, had come through.
The Yazidis are caught up in a larger disaster occurring across Iraq, but one that is hitting Iraqi Kurdistan, once the most stable part of the country, especially hard.
There, a mass migration, precipitated by increasingly widespread fears about the Sunni militants' advance, is underway. It has poured about 580,000 refugees into the Kurdistan region, about 200,000 since Monday when the Islamic State took Sinjar and its surrounding villages, according to Swanson of the U.N. humanitarian assistance office. They are there on top of another 230,000 Syrian refugees.
As the Islamic State has moved steadily through the disputed areas along the border of Iraqi Kurdistan, civilians have fled into the region.
In village after village, town after town, people were running ahead of rumors that the Islamic State was coming. The Kurdish forces offered to help people leave, piling them into huge open trucks and handing out water before they set out for the east or west with their tottering loads. Individuals in cars, pickup trucks and farm vehicles with mattresses strapped on with old twine hobbled along the bumpy roads just trying to get away. The old road to Dohuk, which runs across Kurdistan, was filled with cars heading to larger cities.
This most recent exodus has involved primarily the minority Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, another Muslim sect, and Turkmen Shiites, all of whom the Sunni militants view as heretics, as they do all Shiites.
The particular fear for the Yazidis is that the Islamic State appears not only to be displacing them and forcing conversions, but also especially targeting them for death.
Until the Yazidi fighters and the Syrian peshmerga opened a route, only small numbers were making it down on their own, relying on their sense of the mountain from years of worshiping on its slopes or in some cases herding sheep and goats there. In some cases, groups of women have come alone, bringing their children while their men stayed on the mountain, some to help the Yazidi fighters.
Aslan and his family debated with several other families whether to risk going down the mountain. They were not sure how far they would have to walk or whether, when they reached the foot of the mountain, the gunmen they were fleeing would be there, waiting to kill them. When the Islamic State took the area around Sinjar they cut off routes that would have allowed the Yazidis to go around the mountain and reach the road into Iraqi Kurdistan, effectively driving the Yazidis into the mountain wastes.
After four days without food and with only a few sips of water from shallow springs - parents were spitting into their children's mouths to try to get them some liquid - Aslan's wife, Gerus Khalaf Aslan, said they felt death would soon come to them.
"We decided to risk our children's lives and try to escape," she said.
They were amazed to find that after walking only an hour and a half beyond where they were, they were nearly in Syria and they managed to cross with the help of relatives who met them when they came off the mountain. They then spent their last few dinars on a taxi back to the Kurdish city of Dohuk - testament to how the borders have melted away in this troubled region.
They have spent the last 24 hours living under a highway bridge here, uncertain where they should go or what they should do. Local Kurds have brought them mattresses, bread and cookies and some are bringing cooked food, but their children want desperately to go home.
"We thought ISIS would only stay a short time in our village and we thought the Kurdish fighters would succeed in beating back ISIS," said Gerus Aslan, explaining that their village had been defended against Islamic State fighters by peshmerga soldiers.
"But they used up all their bullets," she said, looking down.
Her husband nodded and said: "We can never go back to our village, or we will die."
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
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