Kurdish militants have trained hundreds of Yazidi volunteers at several camps inside Syria to fight Islamic State forces in Iraq, a member of the armed Kurdish YPG and a Reuters photographer who visited a training camp said on Sunday, according to Reuters.
The photographer spend Saturday at the training camp at the Serimli military base in Qamishli, northeastern Syria on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan, where he saw 55 Yazidis being trained to fight the Islamic State, Reuters reported.
"The Yazidi civilians want to stay in Syria because it is safer but the volunteers really want to go back to Iraq to fight," he said by phone, according to Reuters.
Iraq has been plunged into its worst violence since the peak of a sectarian civil war in 2006-2007, with Sunni fighters led by the Islamic State overrunning large parts of the west and north, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee for their lives and threatening ethnic Kurds in their autonomous province, Reuters reported.
In Syria, the Yazidi volunteers train in weapon use and fighting tactics for several days before being sent back to Mount Sinjar to fight, a member from the media office of the Kurdish YPG told Reuters.
"There are several training camps for Yazidi men who have volunteered," Anas Hani said from eastern Syria, according to Reuters. "In the past ten days, hundreds have graduated. And we are training more."
"On the top of the Singar mountains, in cooperation with locals and the YPG, the Yazidis have established what they call the Singar Resistance Units," he said by phone, Reuters reported.
The YPG, or the People's Defence Units, says it has no political affiliations but analysts say it has close ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party, PKK, who have waged a guerrilla war in Turkey for decades and which the U.S. lists as a terrorist organisation, according to Reuters.
