Yazidis relate horror stories
The bridge at Fishkabur over the Tigris River is the final staging post for the exhausted survivors of what is turning into a Yazidi genocide.
Thin, many of them barefoot, the Yazidis who cross the bridge have escaped across the sunparched Sinjar mountains and through miles of desert beyond, on the only safe path out of territory controlled by the Islamic State as they try to reach northern Syria.
For some the journey ends here. Thousands have decided to stay in Syria, in the newest, full-to-bursting refugee camp in a country already dealing with 9 million of its own displaced. Most, however, choose to continue northeast along the border to cross the river back into northern Iraq.
‘‘We had two choices: stay in Syria at the camp, or come back to Iraq,’’ said Morad Mustafa Suleyman, as he fingered the bandages on his swollen, bleeding feet. ‘‘Neither choice is good. No Yazidi can live in Iraq any longer.’’
More than 100,000 Yazidi people have crossed the Fishkabur bridge in the past week. Everyone who does has a story of neighbours being slaughtered, relatives left to die on the mountain.
In the white-tented settlements that line the road leading from the bridge, tales that are implausibly horrible have become disturbingly mundane.
It is the details that reveal the depth of the tragedy unfolding in the 1370-metre Sinjar mountains: the packs of dogs picking over the unburied bodies, and the final whispered words of goodbye as men leave their mothers to die.
Morad is one of those men. He left his 80-year-old mother in the village of Solakh, alongside 70 others who were too old or crippled to walk any farther. She had already walked up the mountain once, and back down again when they realised they had taken a dead-end route. She could not bear to climb it again.
Morad is praying that the food and water he left with her will keep her alive until help arrives. ‘‘If anyone can rescue them by any means, please do,’’ he wept.
However, Solakh is now surrounded on three sides by fighters from the Islamic State, also known as Isis, and by the mountains on the fourth side, and he knows that only a massive ground assault or an airlift could save them.
Conscious of his friend’s torment, Adil Sharmo did not want to speak about his joyful reunion with his own mother until he was sitting alone. He, too, had left her to die, in a house near the mountaintop village of Karcy, after a 13-hour trek across the mountains.
‘‘I thought that would be the last time I would ever see her,’’ he said.
He could not accept that she could get so close to freedom and still die, however, so when he reached the Syrian border he told the Kurdish fighters waiting there exactly where he had left her.
‘‘My brothers in Germany were calling me every hour, saying, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’’’ Morad said.
His five daughters were sure that their grandmother was dead. However, a few hours later, at dawn, a pickup truck came across the border carrying his mother. ‘‘I cannot describe that moment,’’ he said. ‘‘Thank God she is alive.’’
Illustrating the rapidly escalating scale of the unfolding humanitarian crisis, the United Nations yesterday declared the emergency in the country to have reached the highest level. The agency said that 1.2 million Iraqis had been displaced, with 150,000 refugees in Dohuk city, in Iraqi Kurdistan, alone.
Despite this, the US said on Thursday that a special rescue mission in the Sinjar mountains was unlikely, because many refugees had already fled down the mountain to camps, one of the biggest being Fishkabur.
Adil’s mother, Zarif, now sits with hundreds of other survivors in a school in the Iraqi border town of Zakho that has been turned into a makeshift refugee camp. She is surrounded by the grandchildren who thought that they had lost her for ever.
She is 77, tired and hunched, with a sunbeaten face, but the mental strength that sustained her after her family left her shines in her lively eyes.
‘‘I crawled across the mountain because I could not walk,’’ she said. ‘‘But when we came to Karcy I was exhausted, I couldn’t move. I told Adil to go and to save his daughters but after he left I was crying, and throwing myself on God’s mercy.’’
The house she stayed in was the only one on that stretch of mountaintop road, and it became a beacon for the many people who had made it that far before being drained of their will to live. More than 50 others had stayed there, Zarif said, all certain it would become their tomb.
Some walked to a nearby graveyard, as they felt death near. ‘‘They said that, if they died, at least someone might be able to bury them there,’’ she said.
When the Kurdish forces arrived at the house in Karcy, many there could not believe they were being rescued.
‘‘I didn’t even know where they were taking us, but I have never been so happy,’’ Zarif said. ‘‘I’ve seen my family again, and that’s all I wanted. I’m not afraid of dying now.’’