PakMonitor - News Around The Globe : north Iraq

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BAGHDAD: 
Militants carried out a "massacre" in the northern Iraqi village of 
Kocho, killing dozens of people, most of them members of the Yazidi 
religious minority, officials said on Saturday. 
 
Militants
 from the Islamic State (IS) group are carrying out attacks against 
minorities in Iraq´s Nineveh province, prompting tens of thousands of 
people to flee. 
 
"We have information from multiple 
sources, in the region and through intelligence, that (on Friday) 
afternoon, a convoy of (IS) armed men entered this village," senior 
Iraqi official Hoshyar Zebari told. 
 
"They took their 
revenge on its inhabitants, who happened to be mostly Yazidis who did 
not flee their homes," Zebari said, referring to a religious community 
regarded as heretics by militants. 
 
"They committed a massacre against the people," he said. "Around 80 of them have been killed." 
 
Harim
 Kamal Agha, a senior official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party
 in Dohuk province, which borders Nineveh, put the death toll at 81 and 
said the militants had taken women to prisons they control. 
 
And Mohsen Tawwal, a Yazidi fighter, told by telephone that he saw a large number of bodies in the village. 
 
"We made it into a part of Kocho village, where residents were under siege, but we were too late," he said. 
 
"There were corpses everywhere. We only managed to get two people out alive. The rest had all been killed." 
 
Militants-led
 insurgents launched a major offensive in June that began in Nineveh and
 swept security forces aside, overrunning large areas of five provinces. 
 
In
 one of the most dramatic chapters of the conflict, the militants 
stormed the Sinjar area of northwestern Iraq earlier this month 
prompting tens of thousands of people, many of them Yazidis, to take 
refugee in the mountains. 
 
Kurdish fighters on the ground 
and US air strikes eventually helped most of those trapped to escape 
after more than 10 days under siege, but some remain in the mountains.

Militants kill dozens in north Iraq ‘massacre’: officials

BAGHDAD: Militants carried out a "massacre" in the northern Iraqi village of Kocho, killing dozens of people, most of them m...