'We Left Hundreds Behind': Inside the Helicopter Rescue of Iraq's Stranded Yazidis
Channel 4 News Correspondent Jonathan Rugman was on an Iraqi helicopter, delivering life-or-death supplies to thousands of stranded refugees, surrounded by militants.
ABOVE THE SINJAR MOUNTAINS, Iraq—We took a military helicopter from the northern Iraqi city of Zakho, laden with water, biscuits and dehydration salts. After about half an hour, we saw the Sinjar mountain range ahead of us. It’s a vast and forbidding stretch of mountain with scrub-lands stretching for miles.
As we approached it, we started to see people emerging from the shelter of whatever tree they had found, and they were frantically signaling to us to stop — either to pick them up or to drop aid to them. They were carrying only the clothes on their backs, as far as I could see. I saw one family camping in a dry river bed. They did have a simple blue tarpaulin to keep the sun off them.
The temperature here today was 33 degrees [about 91 degrees Fahrenheit.] It was a perfect blue sky, the sun beating down. People have been trapped on this mountain side for ten days. It was very clear to me that hundreds of them — and I did see hundreds — will die within days without more help.
We dropped the aid pad — the bottles, the boxes — over the side of the helicopter. We were about a hundred feet up. The pilot of the helicopter told us that the American and British aid that had been dropped in the last few days had not reached the people that he was helping.
He was flying low and his men were taking greater risks, dropping the aid from a much lower height. Though I have to say that I was very concerned that some of the bottles of water and some of the boxes would split open or smash on impact when they hit the rocks below.
The helicopter was in such a hurry, it had so many rounds to make, so many deliveries, it didn’t stop to see to check to see if the people got the aid they needed.
Toward the end of our journey, we landed on a rare space of flat ground and the awful scramble of the refugees to get aboard began. The helicopter only touched down for about five precious minutes. During those five minutes the people who were trapped on the mountain tried to squeeze through the helicopter’s narrow door. They tried to squeeze through the gap between the machine gun that was mounted on the door and the rest of the door. They cried as they piled on top of each other as they were trying to get through this door. It was very disturbing to watch.
At one point, one of the airmen began punching and kicking refugees because they were besieging the aircraft and they were in danger of overwhelming it, in their battle for a seat. So what you had, the scene was this: the crew was throwing out more cardboard boxes of aid through the door and, in the opposite direction, old men and women and children were scrambling to get aboard the helicopter to escape their ordeal.
I saw a toddler trapped under several people, its mother was trying to get the baby onto the helicopter. Finally, the mother managed to drag the child free.
I found myself picking up dehydrated children and taking them to the back of the helicopter to recover. It was a really horrific scene because the helicopter only had space for 25 refugees. If there was anybody on the ground, on the mountainside, organizing this evacuation — well, it clearly wasn’t working. It was just a scramble of who who could get on board first.
Then we took off, and the people on the helicopter started crying because they had just gone through the most terrible ordeal and they couldn’t quite believe it was over.
And then, just as we thought that things were getting better, we were told by the pilot that Jihadists from the Islamic State were firing anti-aircraft fire from guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks. And they were firing at us.
And then the crying started again. People thought that their ordeal was over; now it all came back into focus. The Jihadists who had persecuted these people — and in all likelihood killed some of their relatives, and driven them up this mountainside in sheer terror — these jihadists weren’t leaving them alone, even now, but instead trying to shoot down the helicopter that was carrying them out.
These helicopters are piloted by the Iraqi Army, and they are very desperate to tell the world that they are taking part in this aid mission.
