More genocide in Iraq

Gunmen slaughter 23 members of Iraq religious minority

MOSUL, Iraq (AFP) - Unidentified gunmen dragged 23 members of northern Iraq's Yazidi religious minority from a bus on Sunday and shot them dead by the roadside, police Brigadier General Mohammed El-Waqa'a said.

"Workers were travelling back from a textile plant in Mosul to their home in Bashika, east of the city," he said. "Several gunmen stopped the buses, chose the Yazidis among the passengers and killed them in front of everybody."

Police said a group of cars blocked the road in the Al-Nur neighbourhood of east Mosul, while others set up a cordon to protect the gang that stormed the bus convoy. The captives were executed on a field by the road.

Three wounded Yazidis survived, officers said.

The Yazidis, who number some 500,000, mainly in northern Iraq, speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions.

They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Koranic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock.

Some followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.

Nevertheless, the ancient community has survived for centuries alongside its Muslim and Christian neighbours. Now, however, with sectarian war gripping much of Iraq, Sunni Muslim extremists have begun to threaten the community.

Mosul is in the grip of a turf war between Kurds and Arabs and a bitter struggle between Sunni insurgents, the Iraqi government and the US military.

Last week, insurgent gunmen killed 16 Iraqi troops at a checkpoint in Al-Hadhar, on the road towards Tikrit, Baghdad and war-torn central Iraq.

Original article posted here.