Friday, August 15, 2014

WWW: Wide World Wars

Iraq

US conducts new airstrikes as ISIS kills dozens of Yazidis in Iraq town, officials say

The U.S. military conducted new airstrikes against Islamic militants Friday as sources tell Fox News members of the group killed at least 90 male members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in a northern village and kidnapped "dozens" of women and children.
A senior U.S. defense official told Fox News that U.S. surveillance drones saw evidence of the massacre of dozens of Yazidi men. The U.S. military later struck two militant targets, killing some of those involved in the killings, the source said.
The U.S. military said in a statement Friday that the U.S. forces conducted the airstrikes on Islamic State vehicles in the village of Kawju. The village is located south of the village of Sinjar.
The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnic and religious group which numbers in the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, has been persecuted in the north by Islamic State militants, with at least 500 killed prior to Friday's news, according to Iraq's human rights minister.
Sources told Fox News it appears residents in the village did not comply with the militants' demands to convert to Islam.
"[Militants] arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon,'' senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters. "We believe it's because of their creed: convert or be killed."
A Yazidi lawmaker and another senior Kurdish official also said the killings had taken place and that the women of the village were kidnapped.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/16/isis-massacres-dozens-yazidi-in-northern-iraq-town-say-iraqi-officials/?cmpid=edpick&google_editors_picks=true