Displaced Iraqis from the northern town of Sinjar head towards the autonomous Kurdistan region on August 4, 2014. (Photo: AFP)
Updated at 1:55 pm (GMT +3) At least 20,000 civilians who had been besieged by jihadists on a mountain in northern Iraq have safely escaped to Syria and been escorted by Kurdish forces back into Iraq, officials said Sunday.
An official from Iraq's autonomous Kurdish government at the Fishkhabur crossing point said 30,000 displaced who had fled Mount Sinjar had come via Syria and crossed back into Iraq.
Lawmaker Vian Dakhil, who is from the Yazidi minority most of the Mount Sinjar displaced belong to, said 20,000 to 30,000 had managed to flee and were now in Iraqi Kurdistan.
International aid
Britain has begun airdropping food and water to thousands of civilians stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq after fleeing jihadist militants a week ago, officials said Sunday.
The first delivery of aid to the minority Yazidis, which also includes tents, water filters and solar-powered lights that double as phone chargers, took place overnight.
"The world has been shocked by the plight of the Yazidi community. They face appalling conditions, cut off on Mount Sinjar after fleeing persecution," said international development minister Justine Greening.
"The UK has acted swiftly to get life saving help to those affected. Last night the RAF (Royal Air Force) successfully dropped lifesaving UK aid supplies, including clean water and filtration devices, on the mountain."
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Britain planned to set in motion "a continuing drumbeat of airdrop operations working in coordination with the US and potentially with others as well."
"But more widely we are looking at how to support this group of people and get them off that mountain, how we are going to facilitate their exit from what is a completely unacceptable situation," Hammond told reporters on Saturday.
Two Royal Air Force (RAF) C-130 transport planes took off from Britain Saturday carrying reusable filtration containers filled with clean water, tents, tarpaulins and solar lights that can also recharge mobile phones.
Britain's Department for International Development on Friday released £8 million ($13 million, 10 million euros) in emergency humanitarian aid for Iraq.
This includes £2 million of emergency supplies for 75,000 people, including the Yazidis.
France is expected to begin delivering first aid equipment to the Sinjar region later in the day.
France and Britain announced that aid consignments of their own were imminent.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius visited Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil on Sunday for talks with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari and Iraqi Kurdish president Massud Barzani. He was also expected to oversee the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians who have fled the advance of the Islamist fighters.
The United States has already started dropping food and water on Mount Sinjar and is conducting air strikes against the militants.
US fighter planes escorted one C-17 and two C-130 cargo planes that dropped 72 bundles of supplies to "thousands of Iraqi citizens threatened by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Mount Sinjar, Iraq," the Pentagon said.
The bundles included 3,804 gallons of drinking water and more than 16,000 packaged meals.
"To date, in coordination with the government of Iraq, US military aircraft have delivered 52,000 meals and 10,600 gallons of fresh drinking water, providing much-needed aid to Iraqis who urgently require emergency assistance," the Pentagon said.
Amid reports that the children and elderly among them were already dying, US President Barack Obama justified the decision to intervene Thursday with the risk of an impending genocide against the Yazidis.
Yazidi MP Vian Dakhil, whose poignant appeal in parliament this week made her the public voice of her community, said time was running out.
"We have one or two days left to help these people. After that they will start dying en masse," she told AFP Saturday .
The Yazidis, who worship a figure many Muslims associate with the devil, are a small and closed community, one of Iraq's most vulnerable minorities.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is also providing emergency care to around 4,000 people who crossed safely into neighbouring Syria.
"They suffer from dehydration, sunstroke and some of them are seriously traumatised," the IRC's Suzanna Tkalec told AFP, adding that many had walked all day for several days.
US airstrikes, military intervention
The United States has conducted multiple air strikes since Friday, and announced a wave of strikes Saturday it said were to defend attacks on members of the Yazidi minority, who have been stranded on Mount Sinjar since they fled ISIS attacks on their homes a week ago.
US forces "successfully (conducted) four airstrikes to defend Yazidi civilians being indiscriminately attacked" near Sinjar, the United States Central Command, which covers the Middle East, said in a statement.
In the first strike, at 1520 GMT, "a mix of US fighters and remotely piloted aircraft struck one of two ISIL armored personnel carriers firing on Yazidi civilians near Sinjar," the statement said.
After following the remaining vehicle, a second pair of strikes, around 20 minutes later, hit two more armored personnel carriers and an armed truck.
The fourth, at around 1900 GMT, struck another armored personnel carrier also in the Sinjar area.
The US strikes Friday prompted a top Kurdistan official to say the time had come for a fightback -- but there was no immediate sign that was happening.
Security sources and a local official said the bodies of 16 extremists killed in Makhmur, where ISIS positions were bombed on Friday and fighting with Kurdish peshmerga also took place, had been buried nearby on Saturday.
UNESCO chief Irina Bokova called it an "emerging cultural cleansing".
"The US should strike Sinjar, even if there are civilian casualties. It's better than letting everyone die," the Yazidi MP, Vian Dakhil, said.
Obama said he was confident the US could prevent ISIS fighters "from going up the mountain and slaughtering the people who are there" but added the next step of creating a safe passage was "logistically complicated".
Unity government
It remained unclear how much longer and how much deeper inside Iraq US warplanes would intervene, and Obama stressed the real game-changer would be the much-delayed formation of an inclusive government.
Likewise, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Sunday in Baghdad that the formation of a "broad unity government" in Iraq is critical to fighting jihadist expansion.
"In this time, Iraq particularly needs a broad-based unity government because all Iraqis need to feel represented to wage the fight against terrorism together," he said.
He was speaking after a meeting with Iraq's deputy prime minister and acting foreign minister, Hussein al-Shahristani, before heading north to Erbil to oversee the delivery of French aid to displaced civilians.
Many Iraqis see Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as partly responsible for the conflict by institutionalising sectarianism.
Washington, Tehran, the religious leadership and much of his own party have pulled their support but he has dug his heels in and apparently not yet given up on seeking a third term.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, on Saturday alluded to Maliki when he complained "there were some people who do not want the good of the country."
He was being quoted, after a meeting in the city of Najaf, by Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Sako, whose community was displaced on an unprecedented scale this week.
Up to 100,000 Christians were forced to flee from their homes in a matter of hours on Thursday, completely emptying the country's largest Christian city Qaraqosh of its population.
Among the hundreds of thousands of people who fled their homes in northern Iraq were several other minorities such as the Shabak and Turkmen.
Iraq's parliament has been deadlocked on choosing a new prime minister following elections in April.
No flights over Iraq
Kuwait Airways said Sunday it will no longer overfly Iraq in the wake of US air strikes on jihadist positions there, the latest company to reroute its flights.
The airline said the decision concerned flights heading to Europe and the United States.
"Alternative routes will pass over Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt," a statement said.
The Federal Aviation Administration in Washington banned all US civilian flights over Iraq just hours after American warplanes Friday carried out the first air strikes on positions held by jihadists of the Islamic State, who have occupied swathes of northern Iraq.
A slew of airlines have also said they will no longer overfly Iraq, including British Airways, Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, Swiss, Air France, Emirates, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways.
(Reuters, AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Related
- Syrian-Kurdish militias fight IS after Peshmerga fighters’ retreat
- ISIS extends gains in northern Iraq
Uprooted Palestinian 
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Why are the last nazi war criminals, like Alois Bruner, hiding in Syria? Nesselrode sent Porphy Uspensky to de-Hellenize the Antiochians which led to Michel Aflaq founding the Nazi Ba’ath party which is why ras-Putin hid Saddam’s WMD in Syria! Ohlig & Puim show Islamic extremism came from Syriac miaphysates, products of Chrysustolm trying to consummate the Channukah crimes of his Seleucid forefathers. (“Questioning is the subversion of faith” Homily I on I Timothy I- Such was the dark mind that led Justinian to abolish the universities and Olympics and bring on the plagues.) Ochrafuxy is the mother of Islam and bolshevism because they reject Aristotle in favor of Plato. We need a Christian Samaritania buffer state surrounding Israel. Just as we neutralized Greece during the Crimean and Cold wars, we need to give the Balkans back to the aboriginal Albanian Pelasgians to prevent soviet access to the straits. Iran and North Korea both share borders with Russia and are ras-Putin’s ploy to raise oil prices which is why we must fearlessly pursue the therminucular rapture against the magog’s attempt to destabilize the Saudis.
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