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He and 20 or so other men piled into a white Kia truck, unnerved to be separated from their families but hopeful about reaching the mountain, where thousands of Yazidis had fled from the Islamic State’s advance. About 10 minutes later, the truck stopped in the middle of a field, where two other men were waiting with machine guns. Khidir suddenly realized they weren’t going to the mountain after all.

“They made us take the seat of death,” he says. He’ll never forget the eyes of one of the executioners, the only part of his face not obscured by black cloth; he looked as if he was smiling. All the men were blindfolded and forced on their knees. “‘This is the end,’ they told us,” Khidir recalls. “Then boom.”

He heard shots, and one by one, the other men dropped to the ground, some screaming and wailing. “I thought it was all over,” says Khidir.

He felt a blistering hot prick on his neck and fell to the ground. The bullet narrowly missed him, grazing his neck. He pretended to be dead until the men got back into the truck and left. Two hours or so later, Khidir stood up to find all the other men dead, including his cousin, except for one of his neighbours with an injured leg.

“We only had one choice,” he says. “We had to escape.”

So they walked for hours until they reached a neighbouring Sunni Arab village where they were only given water and told to leave.

“I could tell they wanted to help us,” says Khidir. “But no one trusts anyone in this country anymore.”