Snuny, Iraq (CNN) Sharu Baharu, an 80-year-old with a magnificent handle-bar mustache, is facing his second winter on Mount Sinjar, where a bitter wind kicks up as the sun sets over the barren cliffs.
Until last year, he had lived his entire life in the town of Sinjar below.
Then, over a few days during August 2014, 5,000 men and boys in Sinjar and nearby villages were massacred, according to U.N. estimates.
"We fought as long as we could, but we had no weapons and they had so many," Baharu says, gesturing with his index finger for emphasis. "We saw so many killed, but we escaped at night and came to the mountain."
Thousands fled across the mountain and escaped through a narrow corridor forced open by Syrian Kurdish fighters who came to their rescue.
Baharu is a Yazidi, a tiny minority living around Mount Sinjar in Iraq. They are considered heretics by conservative Muslims and were an obvious target for ISIS as it spread across Iraq and Syria.
Baharu recalls how one Arab neighbor, whose family had lived next to his for generations, helped at least 60 Yazidis escape the advancing ISIS convoys.
But another neighbor turned on the Yazidis.
"He raised the Daesh [ISIS] flag and took his gun. He killed nearly 20 people as they tried to leave," Baharu says.
Around him, nine granddaughters play and gaze at the strange visitors. They suffer the cold on Mount Sinjar and have no schooling, but they are lucky to be alive, and the older girls are lucky not to be owned by ISIS fighters.
As many as 7,000 young women and girls were abducted to become sex slaves; even today there are reports of their being sold in the ISIS stronghold of Mosul.
Sinjar is now a chaotic jumble of demolished buildings whose only inhabitants are a few hundred ISIS fighters facing off against small detachments of Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
This Story was culled from CNN due to copyright issues we can post the full story
Read the rest of the story here: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/07/middleeast/iraq-yazidi-sinjar-isis-victims/index.html
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