ISIS: Iraqi Children Drinking Blood To Stay Alive On Mount Sinjar
Iraqi children are drinking the blood of their parents in order to stay alive while hiding on Mount Sinjar from ISIS fighters, according to stories shard by refugees. Approximately 30,000 Yazidis have become trapped by the Islamic State jihadists. About 8,000 people have escaped down the mountain and into Syria, Kuridstan, and Turkey.
Some Yazidis desperate to flee ISIS have paid human smugglers to guide them through minefields and rivers to presumably safe areas. Another 130 United States soldiers were just sent to Iraq to serve in an “advisory capacity.” The British government is also reportedly facing pressure to initiate military intervention to help rescue the Yazidis, Christians, and other refugees living in fear of ISIS.
Sky News reporter Sherine Tadros offered this report from a refugee camp in Dohunk Province in Kurdistan:
“One man has just told us how he saw four children die of thirst. There was nowhere to bury them on the mountain so they just put rocks on their bodies. Another man was saying the Iraqi children were so thirsty, their parents started cutting their own hands and giving them blood to drink.”
About 2,000 Yazidis have been able to journey to a refugee camp in Derabon, which is a small village near Zakho on the border of Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. Since many of the refugees do not have passports, they have not been accepted at official border crossing stations; the tragedy has been a big boon for human smugglers in the region. One female refugee who suffers from painful rheumatism told journalists that she and her three youngsters walked as carefully as possible through a mine field, waded through the Tigris River, and then scaled a barbed-wired fence to reach safety in Turkey.
The mother recalled that part way through the five-hour hike the smugglers attempted to convince the children to leave her behind because she was slowing them down — but the youngsters refused. “My sons gathered around me and they refused. We were not afraid of dying there. We were afraid of dying at the hands of the Islamic State,” the 43-year-old woman said.
Fellow refugee, Amer Omar Pajo, a teenager, said that he saw ISIS shoot his father in the head as the family ran to Mount Sinjar. The young man’s mother ultimately succumbed to dehydration and did not survive the journey off the mountain. According to the teenager, his family sold everything they own to pay the human smuggler to get them to Derabon. Sadly, Pajo has no way to garner the additional $600 to pay another human trafficker to guide him safely to the border crossing.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, approximately 100 ISIS fighters have reportedly been tracked to the United States and England.
What do you think should be done to stop ISIS? Is the Islamic militant group a threat to the United States?
[Images Via: Wikipedia]
