Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said the Sunni
militants had also buried alive some of their victims, including women
and children. Some 300 women were kidnapped as slaves, he added.
“We have striking evidence obtained from
Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene
images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic States have
executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar,” Sudani said in a
telephone interview, in his first remarks to the media on the issue.
A deadline passed at midday on Sunday for 300
Yazidi families to convert to Islam or face death at the hands of the
militants. It was not immediately clear whether the Iraqi minister was
talking about the fate of those families or others in the conflict.
“Some of the victims, including women and
children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around
Sinjar,” Sudani said.
The minister’s comments could pile pressure
on the United States – which has carried out air strikes on Islamic
State targets in response to the group’s latest push through the north –
to provide more extensive support.
“In some of the images we have obtained there
are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the
Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses,”
said Sudani. “This is a vicious atrocity.”
ANCIENT RELIGION
The Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria,
has prompted tens of thousands of Yazidis and Christians to flee for
their lives during their push to within a 30-minute drive of the Kurdish
regional capital Arbil.
Earlier in their push through northern Iraq,
Islamic State, which also considers all Shi’ites heretics who must
repent or die, boasted of killing hundreds of captive Shi’ite soldiers
after capturing the city of Tikrit on June 12. They put footage on the
Internet of their fighters shooting prisoners.
The Yazidis, followers of an ancient religion
derived from Zoroastrianism, are spread over northern Iraq and are part
of the country’s Kurdish minority.
Many of their villages were destroyed when
Saddam Hussein’s troops tried to crush the Kurds during his iron-fisted
rule. Some were taken away by the executed former leader’s intelligence
agents.
Now they are on the defensive again. Tens of
thousands of Yazidis fled for their lives after Kurdish fighters
abandoned them in the face of Islamic State militants, and are trapped
on a mountain near Sinjar at risk of starvation.
“We spoke to some of the Yazidis who fled
from Sinjar. We have dozens of accounts and witness testimonies
describing painful scenes of how Islamic State fighters arrived and took
girls from their families by force to use them as slaves,” Sudani said.
“The terrorist Islamic State has also taken
at least 300 Yazidi women as slaves and locked some of them inside a
police station in Sinjar and transferred others to the town of Tal Afar.
We are afraid they will take them outside the country.”
“The international community should submit to
the fact that the atrocities of the Islamic State will not stop in Iraq
and could be repeated somewhere else if no urgent measures were taken
to neutralize this terrorist group,” Sudani said.
“It’s now the responsibility of the
international community to take a firm stand against the Islamic State
to reach a consensus on a legitimate decision to start the war on
Islamic State to stop genocides and atrocities against civilians.”
The militant group, which arrived in northern
Iraq in June, has routed Kurds in its latest advance, seizing several
towns, a fifth oilfield and Iraq’s biggest dam – possibly gaining the
ability to flood cities and cut off water and power supplies.
