FROM afar, Mount Sinjar rises out of Iraq’s caked-earth flats like a giant upturned tureen. Up close, its crevices offer glimpses of lush tobacco plantations, and the homes of Yazidis lurking within. So formidable are its rugged defences that it has defeated the many foes who for centuries have sought to stamp out the ancient peacock-worshipping sect. Even the most recent and cruel, Islamic State (IS), which massacred and enslaved Yazidi communities on the plains with abandon, gave up the effort once it reached its foothills.

The mountain’s plateau today is coated with tents, sheltering the fortunate thousands who fled for its passes before the jihadists swept through in August 2014 and hunted the others down. Reluctant to entrust their fate to outsiders, they have set up their own administrative council in a caravan, as well as an armed force, the Sinjar Resistance Units, numbering 1,000 men. The multi-faith settlements Saddam Hussein fashioned on the plains below in the 1970s seem a historical relic. Today, says the council chief, Khidr Salih, Iraq’s half million Yazidis need their own enclave and homeland; the region has now fallen to the Kurds.

In Mr Salih’s telling, the Yazidis’ new Kurdish overlords are little better than Arab ones. If the latter perpetrated genocide, the former, he says, let it happen by fleeing without a word in the night as IS approached. “We want international forces,” reads the graffiti on a roadside, indicating the local distrust.

Those are unlikely to come any time soon. Kurdish forces control Fishkhabour, the gateway to Sinjar on the banks of the Tigris River 60 miles (100km) to the north, and access depends on permits. This correspondent was granted permission, but other foreign aid workers and journalists complain they are turned back.

None of Iraq’s warring communities has done more to rescue Yazidis than the Kurds. Whereas other Muslims shunned them as devil-worshippers (the revered Yazidi peacock, Melek Taus, represents a fallen angel associated with Satan), Kurdish fighters opened a corridor to Sinjar after IS took control of the plains. Kurdish leaders, who pride themselves on their religious tolerance, readily accommodated legions of the displaced in vast camps. Though Sunni, they created a department of Yazidi affairs in the religious ministry of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government. Their prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, ordered the renovation of the Yazidis’ second holiest shrine. The Kurds launched a commission to investigate and highlight crimes of genocide, and uncover mass graves—31 at the latest count.