Rescue of Desperation

"The (Kurdish fighters) opened a path for us. If they had not, we would still be stranded on the mountain", said a 22-year-old Yazidi refugee from the Newroz camp in the Syrian Kurdish town of Malikiya, 30 kilometres distant from the border with Iraq. There, camp officials estimate that some two thousand families took shelter within the battered tents on Sunday evening, as wave after wave of desperate-to-escape Yazidis find temporary solace among those expressing compassion for their unspeakable ordeal.

"We are thankful, from our heads to the sky, to the last day on Earth", Naji Hassan, standing at the Tigris River border crossing, exulted at release from what he must have felt was doomsday on the horizon. Kurdish officials estimated that at least 45,000 Yazidis had crossed through the safe passage, and since the UN's estimate was that 50,000 vulnerable people of this ethnic group had fled at the beginning of August, thousands were still left on Mount Sinjar, above their ancestral towns now in the possession of the jihadists of Islamic State.

Displaced Iraqi families from the Yazidi community cross the Iraq-Syria border. Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Most of the refugees were well beyond exhaustion, despairing, under no illusion that their lives had changed forever, that there will be no return to the lives and the places they were forced to flee. And they mourn those whom they had no choice but to leave behind; the elderly and those too disabled and ill to move, knowing their likely fate. Many hadn't eaten for days while on the mountain, lips and feet dry, cracked and swollen. But, unlike many others, they survived.

Syrian Kurdish fighters came in direct conflict with the Islamists in their determination to open an escape route for the tens of thousands of Yazidis, an offshoot group of Kurdish extraction who worship an ancient religion much predating Islam. The Kurds have proven to be more successful in aiding the refugees than the Iraqi military and the United States with its airdrops that self-destructed as water bottles and food came in direct impact with the unyielding mountain granite.

The Syrian Kurds began cramming the Yazidi refugees into any vehicles they could commandeer to take the escape route, carrying them 40 kilometres to safety from their heat-prostrating and starvation perch on the mountain. "We answered their cries for help. We saw that we had to help them and protect them; they are Kurds and part of our nation", said military official Omar Ali.

And now good fortune has gone another step further with the latest news that United States airstrikes and Kurdish fighters had broken the siege on Mount Sinjar, allowing thousands of Yazidis trapped there to escape. U.S. military advisers had landed on Mount Sinjar early on Wednesday to assess the organization of an evacuation. Washington has announced it will consider the use of American ground troops if the military team recommends they assist in the rescue of the remaining thousands of refugees.