CAMP BAJID KANDALA, Iraq — With shocked, sunburned faces, men, women and children in dirt-caked clothes limped into a camp for displaced Iraqis, finding safety after harsh days of hiding on a blazing mountaintop after fleeing from the extremist Islamic State group.
Children who died of thirst were left behind; some exhausted mothers abandoned living babies, as thousands of Yazidis trekked across a rocky mountain chain in temperatures over 100 degrees, crossing into neighboring Syria, and then looping back into Iraq to reach safety at the Bajid Kandala camp. At least 56 children died in the mountains, Juliette Touma of the U.N. children’s agency estimated.
Other Yazidis have settled in refugee camps in Syria: So desperate is their situation, they have sought safety in a country aflame in a civil war.
The displacement of at least tens of thousands of Yazidis — Kurdish speakers who practice an ancient Mesopotamian faith — meant yet another Iraqi minority was peeled away as the Islamic State extremists continue their sweep of Iraq, seizing territory they brutally administer. The group’s fighters have expelled Christians, Shiite Muslims and adherents of the tiny Shabak faith. The hardliners see other religious groups as heretics who may be killed or forced to submit to their rule.