Several hundred Yazidi captives have been killed in Iraq by
Islamic State (IS) militants west of Mosul, Yazidi and Iraqi officials say.
A statement from the Yazidi Progress Party said 300 captives
were killed on Friday in the Tal Afar district near the city.
Iraqi Vice-President Osama al-Nujaifi described the reported
deaths as "horrific and barbaric".
Thousands of members of the religious minority group were
captured last year.
It is not clear how they were killed, or why this has
happened now, says the BBC's Middle East editor Alan Johnston.
Many are reported to have been held in Mosul, the main
stronghold of IS after the militants swept through large areas of northern and
western Iraq, and eastern Syria in 2014.
Yazidis, whose religion includes elements of several faiths,
are considered infidels by IS.
Thousands fled to the Kurdish-controlled region of northern
Iraq after IS captured the Yazidi-populated Sinjar district in Nineveh
province.
Hundreds of men were killed, while some Yazidi women were
held and used as sex slaves.
In other developments on Saturday:
a car bomb exploded near a popular restaurant in Baghdad's
predominantly Shia Karrada district, killing at least 13 people
at least six Iraqi soldiers died in a suicide car bomb
attack in the town of Garma in western Anbar province
IS pushed back
The Yazidi Progress Party's statement, quoted by the Kurdish
Shafaq News website, condemned the latest incident as a "heinous
crime" and called on Iraqi forces to free those still held by IS.
In January, IS released some 200 mainly elderly Yazidis into
the hands of Kurdish officials near the city of Kirkuk.
Many of them, held in Mosul, had disabilities or were
wounded, though no reason was given by IS for their release.
In recent months, IS has been pushed back from some of the
areas it captured, though many Yazidi villages are thought to remain under the
militants' control.
In December, Kurdish Peshmerga forces drove back IS
militants in north-western Iraq, relieving a long siege of Sinjar mountain
where thousands of Yazidis had sought refuge.
The Iraqi government, with forces backed by Iran, also
declared it had taken back control of the city of Tikrit in April.
Extracted from - BBC News May 2, 2015
