By Barzan Muhammad
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Even at night, the heat is unbearable in Khanke, a refugee camp that has sheltered nearly 70,000 Yezidis since August.
Life for the Yezidi refugees, driven from their homes by Islamic extremists in Shingal, Nineveh province, is clouded in despair: in addition to the heat, sanitation is poor at this camp less than an hour’s drive from the city of Dohuk. As there are no proper lavatories and baths, refugees struggle to hold off the outbreak of diseases.
Mosquitoes buzz in the thick, dusty air, making it virtually impossible to sleep in the tents. It is particularly difficult for the most vulnerable, including infants whose cries echo through the night.
Some 69,000 Yezidi refugees are placed here, according to officials, after fleeing the brutal onslaught by the Islamic State (IS) extremists on their town of Shingal in August. Most of them have chilling stories of rape, torture, mass killing and abductions perpetrated by the militants against their relatives.
Perhaps this explains why most of the refugees here at the camp are women and children—young men and women were either executed or abducted, they say.
One refugee, who asked to remain anonymous, said she never expected their Arab neighbors to take part in the attacks.
“They stabbed us in the back,” she said of the day when their village was seized by the IS militants who were supported by the local Sunni Arabs. “We had no weapons, no ammunition to defend our town and in the end we decided to leave for Shingal mountain.”
Refugees from the Yezidi villages of Gir Uzer, Siba Shekh Khider, Tal Qasab, Tal Banat all have similar stories of their traumatic escape to the mountain, where they were encircled by IS militia and faced a massive humanitarian crisis. They witnessed mothers burying their newborn babies, the elderly dying of hunger and dozens of others who were too weak to march up the mountain.
The first few days on the mountain were the worst, without food and water, the refugees reported. In a matter of days thousands of others joined them there.
Nearly a week later Peshmerga troops, supported by US airstrikes, managed to secure a passageway into neighboring Syria.
Another refugee said that when IS invaded his village, Kocho, residents were forced into the local mosque. Yezidis are ethnically Kurdish but are part of an ancient sect that Islamists consider heresy.
“They separated the women from the men,” the 17-year-old boy recalled. “They asked us to convert to Islam. They gave us three days and told us that it was fine if we didn’t convert to Islam but that we had to leave.”
The jihadists targeted Yezidis but also killed indiscriminately—both those they deemed believers and non-believers. One Muslim woman said that her husband, along with his father and two brothers, were publicly executed in front of her.
Yet perhaps nothing they have experienced has been as traumatic as the mass abduction of their women and the rape of Yezidi girls.
