The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has released more than 200 mostly elderly members of northern Iraq's Yazidi minority who had been held for months, AFP has reported, citing officials and human rights activists. The Yazidis were freed on the front line southwest of the city of Kirkuk on Saturday and met by Kurdish peshmerga forces who brought them to a health centre in Altun Kopri, on the road to the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil, the news agency said. "These men and women had been held in Mosul," Khodr Domli, a leading Yazidi rights activist told AFP at the centre. "We already have names for 196 and there could be some more." "Some are wounded, some have disabilities and many are suffering from mental and psychological problems," he said. According to officials from Kirkuk and Erbil, the group was moved from Mosul via Hawija and freed at the Khaled entrance to Kirkuk. Dozens of Kurdish doctors and nurses provided emergency care at the Altun Kopri health centre, where Yazidis who had heard the news started to mass at the gates, hoping to be reunited with missing relatives. "We have dispatched laboratory teams to check their blood, to control for things such as polio and possible contagious diseases," said Saman Barzanji, director general of the Erbil health department. "Another team is here to handle the people's immediate health needs. We have also deployed ambulance teams to dispatch emergency cases to hospital," he said. 'They were a burden' One of those freed recalled how they had been moved from one place to another in northern Iraq since being captured in early August. "It was so hard, not only because of the lack of food but also because I spent so much time worrying," he said. ISIL carried out a June offensive that began in Mosul and overran much of Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad, sweeping security forces aside. Officials told AFP the mass release, the largest of its kind, took them by surprise and said there had been no coordination with ISIL. "IS must have decided that they could no longer feed them, look after them. They were a burden," said Domli, using an alternative acronym for the group. "IS saw that there was no benefit for them in keeping these old people," said Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament who made a poignant appeal to the international community for assistance in August.

• published: 18 Jan 2015
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