Gunmen kill members of religious minority in Iraq

Gunmen killed 23 members of the Yazidi religious minority in northern Iraq today, after stopping their bus and separating out followers of other faiths, police said.

Yazidis are a small group concentrated mostly around the northern city of Mosul, 225 miles north-west of Baghdad.

They are primarily Kurdish, and worship an angel figure that some Muslims and Christians consider the devil.

Armed men in several cars stopped the bus around 2pm, as it was carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed Christian and Yazidi population.

The gunmen checked passengers’ identification cars, then asked all Christians to get off the bus, said police Brigadier Mohammed al-Wagga.

They hijacked the bus with all the Yazidis still inside, and drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death execution-style, al-Wagga said.

After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika. Shops were shuttered and many Muslim residents closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks. Police set up additional checkpoints across the city.

Bashika is about 80 percent Yazidi, 15 percent Christian and about five percent Muslim.

A police spokesman for Ninevah province, where Mosul is the provincial capital, said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam.

The woman had fallen in love with a Muslim man, then converted to Islam and ran off with him, said police spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf.

Her relatives disapproved of the match and dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said.

A grainy video showing gruesome scenes of the woman’s killing was distributed on Iraqi websites in recent weeks, but its authenticity could not be independently confirmed.

Sunday’s killings by Muslim extremists were an attempt to avenge the woman’s death, Khalaf said.