Mortars kill 16 more Iraqi civilians

Iraqi military and hospital officials say mortar rounds fired by Daesh militants have killed 16 civilians in neighborhoods already retaken by troops.

They said the bodies of the 16, killed overnight and early on Saturday, have been brought to military hospitals in eastern Mosul. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
In Mosul, an Associated Press team in eastern Mosul on Saturday says scores of civilians are continuing to stream out of the inner neighborhoods of the city to escape the fighting, making their way to camps for the displaced.
The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, says at least 73,000 Iraqis have fled Mosul since the government’s campaign to retake the city began on Oct. 17.

Escaping captivity

Meanwhile, the fate of the Yazidis, a religious community — one of Iraq’s oldest minorities – still hangs in the balance as they find themselves caught between devil and the deep blue sea.
While they escape the Daesh captivity as Shiite militias bring the fight to northern Iraq, the Yazidis fear sectarian revenge by the Shiite fighters.
When shells began crashing around the town of Tal Afar, Abu Faraj saw his chance to escape captivity. He and 17 other members of the Yazidi, moved to the town’s outskirts while their Daesh captors were busy with the battle.
Four days later, in the early evening, they fled. The group, which included women and children, walked overnight through the desert and hours later reached Kurdish-controlled territory — and safety.
“I remember the exact time we decided to flee, it was 6:50 p.m.,” said Abu Faraj, 23, who had waited more than two years for that moment.
“We had to walk in single file through the desert and follow each other’s footsteps in case the area was mined,” he said, giving an alias for fear of identification by Daesh militants, who still hold some of his relatives.
The group, including Abu Faraj’s wife and two daughters, were captured when Daesh overran Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014.
The insurgents systematically killed, captured and enslaved thousands of Yazidis, whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions and are regarded by Daesh as devil-worshippers.
Mass Yazidi graves have been found since Kurdish forces retook areas north of Sinjar in December 2014, and the town itself in November 2015, but Daesh had already transferred many Yazidis to other areas, including Tal Afar.
Reports from the area suggest thousands of people have fled Tal Afar in recent days as the Shiite paramilitary groups — assisting a US-backed operation to drive Daesh out of the city of Mosul to the east — advanced.
Most of those who have fled are from the town’s Turkmen majority, fearing sectarian revenge by the Shiite fighters.
But Yazidis are also among them, and for Abu Faraj and his fellow Yazidis, who squat for now in a half-finished building in the northern city of Duhok, the escape has been a huge relief.

Husband, daughter taken away
Abu Faraj, who worked as a slave laborer in Tal Afar, is among the few young Yazidi men to have escaped Daesh. He did not say how he managed to survive when others had disappeared or been killed, also for fear of identification.
“The rest of the group are women, children and elderly,” he said.
UN investigators said in a report in June that Daesh is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes.
One 42-year-old woman, who gave her name only as “a member of the Meshu family” and covered her face with a scarf, made the same journey as Abu Faraj with her three youngest children.
“When we finally made it to a peshmerga (Kurdish forces) position, we took our veils off and raised our hands, with our all-black clothes we were scared they’d think we were Daesh and shoot us,” she said.
Her husband, 16-year-old son and 20-year-old daughter had been separated from her and the younger children when they were first taken by the militants.
“I don’t know what has happened to them, or where they are,” she said. Daesh took many Yazidi girls as sex slaves. The family was moved from town to town after their capture, spending some time in makeshift prisons and the rest under what amounted to house arrest in Tal Afar.
“We didn’t leave the house except to get essential supplies. I avoided sending the kids to an Daesh school,” she said.
“Daesh fighters gave us just enough to eat, but it was often dirty food and water,” she said, sitting next to her tired and pale children. The Office of Kidnapped Affairs in Duhok, a department backed by the Kurdistan regional government, said about 3,500 Yazidis were believed to remain in areas controlled by Daesh, many of them women and children.

Source: Arab News