ISTANBUL - Yazidi leaders and emergency relief officials on Thursday strongly disputed American claims that the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq had been broken and that the crisis was effectively over, saying that tens of thousands of Yazidis remained on the mountain in desperate conditions.
On Wednesday, the United States military said that a small team of 18 Marines and Special Operations soldiers had completed an assessment of conditions on Mount Sinjar and found that most of the Yazidis, a small Iraqi religious minority, had succeeded in escaping, and the numbers remaining were in the low thousands.
American officials said that the assessment meant American airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops, along with efforts by Kurdish pesh merga militiamen, were working and 'an evacuation mission is far less likely,' in the words of Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby on Wednesday.
Speaking from her hospital bed here, Vian Dakhil, an Iraqi member of Parliament and a Yazidi leader who was injured in the crash of a helicopter delivering aid to the mountain on Tuesday, said she was aware of the American claims and had discussed them with Yazidi leaders still in the area.
Sources: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; U.S. Department of Defense; American and Kurdish officials
Sources: American and Kurdish officials
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Ottoman Empire Sykes-Picot Agreement Current Boundaries Ottoman Empire
Before WWI, the Middle East was divided into several administrative provinces under the Ottoman Empire. Modern Iraq is roughly made up of the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.
Sykes-Picot Agreement
In 1916, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, British and French diplomats, secretly drew the first map to divide up the Ottoman Empire, beginning a series of border negotiations that led to the establishment of British and French mandates in 1920.
Religious and Ethnic Regions Today
Iraq's current boundaries bring together different, often adversarial, groups under one mixed national identity that has been strained by conflict. Still, if Iraq were to split, partition would not be so simple as drawing new borders along religious or ethnic lines.
Sources: Rand, McNally & Co. World Atlas (1911 Ottoman Empire map); United Kingdom National Archives (Sykes-Picot); Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University's Gulf 2000 project (religious and ethnic map)
Key Sunni majority Shiite majority Christian majority Mixed areas
2003: Before the Invasion
Before the American invasion, Baghdad's major sectarian groups lived mostly side by side in mixed neighborhoods. The city's Shiite and Sunni populations were roughly equal, according to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert.
2009: Violence Fuels Segregation
Sectarian violence exploded in 2006. Families living in areas where another sect was predominant were threatened with violence if they did not move. By 2009 Shiites were a majority, with Sunnis reduced to about 10 percent to 15 percent of the population.
* Kadhimiya, a historically Shiite neighborhood, is home to a sacred Shiite shrine.
* Adhamiya, a historically Sunni neighborhood, contains the Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni landmark.
* The Green Zone became the heavily fortified center of American operations during the occupation.
* Sadr City was the center of the insurgent Mahdi Army, led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
* Huriya was transformed in 2006 when the Mahdi Army pushed out hundreds of families in a brutal spasm of sectarian cleansing.
* More than 8,000 displaced families relocated to Amiriya, the neighborhood where the Sunni Awakening began in Baghdad.
* Adhamiya, a Sunni island in Shiite east Baghdad, was walled and restricted along with other neighborhoods in 2007 for security.
* Neighborhoods east of the Tigris River are generally more densely populated than areas to the west.
2003: Before the Invasion
Before the American invasion, Baghdad's major sectarian groups lived mostly side by side in mixed neighborhoods. The city's Shiite and Sunni populations were roughly equal, according to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert.
* Kadhimiya, a historically Shiite neighborhood, is home to a sacred Shiite shrine.
* Adhamiya, a historically Sunni neighborhood, contains the Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni landmark.
* The Green Zone became the heavily fortified center of American operations during the occupation.
* Sadr City was the center of the insurgent Mahdi Army, led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
2009: Violence Fuels Segregation
Sectarian violence exploded in 2006. Families living in areas where another sect was predominant were threatened with violence if they did not move. By 2009 Shiites were a majority, with Sunnis reduced to about 10 percent to 15 percent of the population.
* Huriya was transformed in 2006 when the Mahdi Army pushed out hundreds of families in a brutal spasm of sectarian cleansing.
* More than 8,000 displaced families relocated to Amiriya, the neighborhood where the Sunni Awakening began in Baghdad.
* Adhamiya, a Sunni island in Shiite east Baghdad, was walled and restricted along with other neighborhoods in 2007 for security.
* Neighborhoods east of the Tigris River are generally more densely populated than areas to the west.
Source: Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University's Gulf 2000 project
Source: Satellite image by NASA
Sources: Global Terrorism Database, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (attack data); Congressional Research Service; Council on Foreign Relations; Long War Journal; Institute for the Study of War
Source: 'The Islamic State in Iraq Returns to Diyala' by Jessica Lewis, Institute for the Study of War
Safin Hamed/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images
'It's not true,' she said.
'It's better now than it had been, but it's just not true that all of them are safe - they are not,' Ms. Dakhil said. 'Especially on the south side of the mountain, the situation is very terrible. There are still people who are not getting any aid.'
She estimated the number of Yazidis trapped on the southern flanks of Mount Sinjar at 70,000 to 80,000.
Ms. Dakhil's assessment of the seriousness of the Yazidis' plight was supported by United Nations humanitarian officials, who on Thursday were unequivocal that there remained a major crisis among the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar.
'The crisis on Mount Sinjar is by no means over,' said David Swanson, the spokesman for the United Nations coordinator of humanitarian affairs in northern Iraq, interviewed by telephone from Dohuk, in northern Iraq. 'Although many people managed to escape from the north side, there are still thousands of others up there, under conditions of extreme heat, dehydration and imminent threat of attack. The situation is far from solved.'
Mount Sinjar is about 60 miles long, and five to ten miles wide.
Ms. Dakhil was a passenger on the helicopter that crashed after takeoff, leaving the pilot dead and several people injured, including a New York Times correspondent, Alissa J. Rubin. A prominent Yazidi leader, Ms. Dakhil's impassioned speech last week decrying efforts by Sunni militants to carry out a genocide against the Yazidis was critical in galvanizing international concern for the Yazidis's plight. An ancient people who are neither Christian nor Muslim, and live mostly in northern Iraq near Mount Sinjar, the Yazidis are regarded as heretics by the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has vowed to kill them all. United Nations officials have expressed alarm at numerous reports that the militants also have raped and enslaved many Yazidi women as forced brides or concubines.
Ms. Dakhil, who said she is in touch with Yazidis in the Mount Sinjar area, suggested that the American military assessment team must have visited the northern side of the mountain, the only area that can be reached by helicopters easily, whereas the greatest problem lay to the south, closer to positions held by ISIS militants and therefore dangerous to travel to by helicopter.
Kieran Dwyer, the chief spokesman for the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator, did not comment directly on the American military's assessment. 'We're not doing a military assessment,' he said, 'we're doing a humanitarian assessment.' From a humanitarian perspective, the problem remains grave, he said.
In a telephone news conference from Dohuk, Iraq, Mr. Dwyer also told reporters at the United Nations that in the past three or four days, 'large numbers of people have come off the mountain,' but that thousands remain, and 'we still need to address that issue.'
'The crisis on the mountain will not be over until everyone comes off in a safe and secure manner,' he said.
Mr. Swanson said that United Nations officials had no doubt about the circumstances of the Yazidis. 'We have multiple, both primary and secondary, sources coming in. This is Day 12 of the crisis and it is far from over,' he said.
Although airdrops have helped some Yazidis, they are an imperfect solution, Mr. Dwyer said. 'What we need now is access, to assure that people are provided with the life-sustaining assistance they need.'
President Obama on Thursday referred to the assessment team, which said the civilians on the mountain were getting food and water and managing to reach safety.
'The bottom line is the situation on the mountain has greatly improved and Americans should be proud,' he said in a televised statement from Martha's Vineyard, where he has been vacationing. Asserting that the ISIS siege had been broken with American military help, Mr. Obama said: 'We do not expect there to be an additional operation to get people off the mountain.'
The small ground-force unit that carried out the assessment was now out of Iraq, he said.
'As commander in chief, I could not be prouder of our men and women who carried out this operation almost flawlessly,' Mr. Obama said.
In Turkey, the government's crisis response center, known by its Turkish acronym AFAD, announced that it was planning to build refugee camps for the Yazidis in Turkey if it proved necessary, and was already building camps for them on the Iraqi side of the border.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has counted 80,000 Yazidi refugees fleeing the fighting, Mr. Swanson said, although it was unclear how many of them had come down from Mount Sinjar, and how many from other areas.
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