ISIL fighters attacked a village in Iraq: almost 80 Yazidis were massacred

Kurdish officials announced that approximately 80 members of the Yazidi minority were "massacred" on Friday in a village in northern Iraq, Reuters reported today.

"They arrived this afternoon in vehicles and started killing them. We believe because of their religion: 'change it or we will kill you,'" Kurdish official Hoshiar Zebari told the British news agency.

Yazidi lawmaker Mahama Halil said he had spoken to survivors from the village, who said the slaughter was carried out within an hour.

A resident of a neighboring village said that a fighter of the extremist Islamic State group told him the details of the murder.

"He told me that the Islamic State had been persuading the villagers to convert to Islam for five days...after that they rounded up these people and killed them. They probably took the women and girls to Tal Afar, because there are foreign fighters there," he said.

Reuters states that this statement has no independent confirmation.

According to official Baghdad, Islamic State extremists killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi ethnic minority during the offensive in the north, while Sunni militants buried some of the victims alive, including women and children.

Human Rights Minister Mohamad Shija al Sudani also said that approximately 300 women were kidnapped.

Sunnis support the new prime minister

Several Sunni figures in Iraq have lent their support to the Iraqi Shiite government of Haider al-Abadi, which is tasked with resisting the offensive by Sunni extremists.

In an interview with Iraqi television, the influential leader of the Sunni tribe, Dulaimi Ali Hatem Suleiman, expressed his readiness to cooperate with Abadi, but on the condition that he guarantees the rights of the Sunni minority, which was marginalized during the previous government of Nuri al-Maliki.

Suleiman did not rule out the possibility of Sunnis fighting the Islamic State in the same way as others who joined US and government forces in the fight against Al Qaeda from 2006 to 2009.

Sunni representatives of Anbar and other Iraqi provinces have drawn up a list of demands that will be handed over to Abadi, who was appointed five days ago as the head of the new Iraqi government.