A child from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, rests at the Iraqi-Syrian border crossing in Fishkhabour, Dohuk province.
A child from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, rests at the Iraqi-Syrian border crossing in Fishkhabour, Dohuk province.Reuters

While the US relief teams, along with the Kurdish army, are still working on a strategy to rescue the rest of the Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains, the rescued have a story of the sheer ruthlessness of Islamic State to share.

The militants attacked the Yazidi towns around Sinjar on 3 August, and hundreds of men have been beheaded since then, while scores of women have been raped and abducted.

In one incident, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, asked a woman to come and collect her husband's head.

"I was away in my father's village the day when the massacre happened. I called home the next day. The ISIL terrorist who answered the phone told me: 'Come and take your husband's head.' They killed 40 of my relatives. How can I speak now?" Seno, a 20-year-old from Quadia, told Hurriyet Daily.

Meanwhile, Nasr, a 50-year-old Yazidi man, said that he saw men being beheaded, women being kidnapped and babies being thrown violently during the attack. 

"The people you are seeing here are only those who were able to save their lives," Nasr stressed.

There are also concerns over the 300 Yazidi women kidnapped by the Islamic State fighters. The Yazidis fear the militants will forcefully impregnate the women, in an attempt to break up the ancient sect's bloodline, Daily Mail reported.

"The Kurds and Yazidis are originally Aryans. But because the Yazidis are such a closed community they have retained a fairer complexion, blonder hair and bluer eyes. They don't marry non-Yazidis," said Adnan Kochar, chairman of the Kurdish Cultural Centre in London.

"ISIS have taken around 300 women from Sinjar to give to jihadists to marry and make pregnant to have a Muslim child. If they can't kill all Yazidis, they will try to smash the blond bloodline," Kochar added.

Alarmed by the crisis in Iraq, the United Nations declared the highest level of humanitarian emergency in the country earlier this week. The UN has also accused the Islamic State of carrying out "barbaric" acts of sexual violence against women and children belonging to Iraqi minorities.

UN special representative Nickolay Mladenov said that the declaration by the UN of a "Level 3 Emergency" in Iraq would "facilitate mobilization of additional resources in goods, funds and assets to ensure a more effective response to the humanitarian needs of populations affected by forced displacements," BBC News reported.