Smugglers and Kurdish militants help Iraq's Yazidis flee to Turkey

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By Humeyra Pamuk SILOPI Turkey (Reuters) - Sewra was terrified of being caught by Turkish soldiers as she, her children and grandchildren inched their way through Iraq's mountai**us border region, fleeing an Islamist militant onslaught by cover of darkness. The 56-year-old and her family, among tens of thousands of Yazidis uprooted by Islamic State militants, paid $500 to an Iraqi man with relatives in Turkey who said he could get them over the border to safety without passports or visas. "If they'd caught us and tried to send us back to Iraq, I would have killed myself," Sewra said, sheltering from the sun under a makeshift tent in a refugee camp in the Turkish town of Silopi, a stone's throw from the border. "Iraq is finished for us, there's ** going back." Yazidis like Sewra, followers of an ancient religion derived from Zoroastrianism, fled their homeland in the Sinjar mountains as Sunni militants, who see them as devil worshippers, seized towns and carried out mass killings this month.

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