Who are the Yazidis?

Among the many victims of the advance of The Islamic State (IS) in the Middle East are a group of up to 50,000 Yazidis, who are trapped in the mountains in northwest Iraq without food or water. Author Diana Darke explains who these mysterious religious adherents are.

Suddenly thrust into the limelight by their plight, the Yazidis will not welcome the glare of international attention. On account of their unusual beliefs, they are often unjustly referred to as "devil worshippers", and have traditionally held themselves apart in small communities mainly scattered across northwest Iraq, northwest Syria and southeast Turkey.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of women from the Yazidi religious minority have been taken captive by Sunni militants with "vicious plans," an Iraqi official said Friday, further underscoring the dire plight of Iraq's minorities at the hands of the Islamic State group.

Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq's Human Rights Ministry, said hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35 are being held in schools in Iraq's second largest city, Mosul. He said the ministry learned of the captives from their families.

"We think that the terrorists by now consider them slaves and they have vicious plans for them," Amin told The Associated Press. "We think that these women are going to be used in demeaning ways by those terrorists to satisfy their animalistic urges in a way that contradicts all the human and Islamic values."

The U.S. has confirmed that the Islamic State group has kidnapped and imprisoned Yazidi women so that they can be sold or married off to extremist fighters, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information came from classified intelligence reports. There was no solid estimate of the number of women victimized, the official said.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled when the Islamic State group earlier this month captured the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border. The Yazidis practice an ancient religion that the Sunni Muslim radicals consider heretical.

The extremist group's capture of a string of towns and villages in the north has sent minority communities fleeing for their lives. The Islamic state views Yazidis and Shiite Muslims as apostates, and has demanded Christians either convert to Islam or pay a special tax.

About 50,000 Yazidis — half of them children, according to U.N. figures — fled to the mountains outside Sinjar where many of them remain, trapped and running out of food and water. Late Thursday, the U.S. military cargo jets dropped humanitarian aid to the mountains.

Amin's comments were the first Iraqi government confirmation that some women were being held by the group. On Tuesday, Yazidi lawmaker Vian Dakheel made an emotional plea in parliament to the Iraqi government to save the Yazidi people, saying the "women have been sold in a slavery market."

President Barack Obama said the humanitarian airdrops were made at the request of the Iraqi government as the Islamic State militant group tightened its grip on northern Iraq. In his remarks late Thursday, he mentioned "chilling reports" of fighters with the group "rounding up families, conducting mass executions, and enslaving Yazidi women."

The U.N. Security Council issued a statement Friday condemning targeted attacks against Iraq's minorities, adding that any widespread attacks against civilian populations based on ethnic, religious or political background may be considered a crime against humanity for which those responsible must be held accountable.

It is almost a year since thousands of Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar, in northern Iraq, as Islamic State fighters entered their villages.

Some escaped but many Yazidi men were killed and young women and girls are still being held as sex slaves by the group.

Some of the girls have managed to escape and have been speaking to the BBC about their ordeals, as Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports.

When members of the Yazidi religious minority fled as Islamic State (IS) militants swept across northern Iraq a year ago, many women and girls were enslaved. But hundreds have now been freed thanks to a network of smugglers run by an Iraqi businessman, as BBC Persian's Nafiseh Kohnavard reports.