The Drama of Sinjar: Escaping the Islamic State in Iraq

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pkk-assistance-for-yazidis-escaping-the-jihadists-of-the-islamic-state-a-986648.html



Last week, thousands of Yazidis were evacuated from the Sinjar Mountains in Iraq, where they had fled due to marauding fighters from the Islamic State. Kurdish fighters from the PKK helped them escape, but it remains unclear if anyone can stop the IS jihadists.

The Drama of Sinjar: Escaping the Islamic State in Iraq
By Christoph Reuter
August 18, 2014 – 04:16 PM

On the eighth day up on the mountain, Bagisa gave birth to her first child, a girl. She named her Khudaida.

Bagisa and her husband Hadi had fled from the village of Sumari. The couple was lucky; they had left alone, allowing them to avoid the groups that came under fire from attackers. But being alone also meant that when they finally stopped running, in the shade of a cliff wall, they knew none of the others who likewise found shelter there. There was no one willing to share their valuable water with Bagisa. The couple now had a daughter, but they didn't have anything to drink.

Other families with infants joined together in order to provide a modicum of shade for mothers and babies and they saved a few drops from the spartan amounts of water rationed out each day. Or they divided up the few sips of water they spent hours each day collecting from the hollows of dried out mountain streams.

But nobody helped Bagisa, Hadi and their baby. They had to withstand the heat on their own -- until, on the day following Khudaida's birth, three Kurdish fighters, members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), finally appeared and brought them to the Newroz camp across the border in Syria.