Militants kill 80 Yazidis, kidnap women in north Iraq

Insurgents of the Islamic State militant group killed some 80 members of Iraqi Yazidi religious minority and kidnapped some 200 women and children from the minority, a Kurdish security source said on Saturday.
The 80 Yazidi men were executed at the house of a Yazidi tribal leader in the village of Kocho, just west of the town of Sinjar, which located some 100 km west of Nineveh's provincial capital city of Mosul, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The Yazidis were killed because they refused to convert to Islam, the source said.
Meanwhile, more than 200 women and children have been kidnapped by the Islamic State militants and said to be seized in the city of Tal Afar, some 70 km west of Mosul, which has been under the control of the militants more than a month ago, the source said.
Earlier, the militants captured the town of the predominantly Yazidi town of Sinjar and surrounding villages, pushing dozens of thousands Yazidis to flee their homes to Sinjar mountain and the nearby cities of the Kurdistan region.
The security situation began to drastically deteriorate in Iraq on June 10 when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and hundreds of Sunni militants who took control of the country's northern city of Mosul and later seized swathes of territories after the Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces.