(Reuters) - Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, burying some of their victims alive and kidnapping hundreds of women, a Baghdad government minister said on Sunday.
The insurgents' advance through northern Iraq has forced tens of thousands to flee, threatened the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region and provoked the first U.S. air strikes in the area since Washington withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011.
Iraq's human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani told Reuters that he had evidence that the Sunni militants had thrown the Yazidi into mass graves, adding that some of those buried alive were women and children. About 300 women had been forced into slavery, he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/10/us-iraq-security-idUSKBN0G808J20140810