“If we had been another 50 meters higher we’d all be dead,” he said.

Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff for the president of the Kurdistan region, Massoud Barzani, said two rescue helicopters later took the survivors to safety at a pesh merga base. They were then transferred to ambulances, and Ms. Rubin and Mr. Ferguson were taken to a hospital in Zakho, a town near the Turkish border, where Ms. Rubin received emergency medical care.

Aside from the pilot, there were no other fatalities. Mr. Ferguson said the aircraft might have been overloaded, but Mr. Hussein attributed the crash to an accidental loss of control by the pilot when the aircraft hit a boulder as it was lifting off. The precise cause was not clear.

Image Adam Ferguson

Kurdish news media said the passengers included Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of Iraq’s Parliament, who had helped draw international attention to the plight of the thousands of Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains by the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Ms. Dakhil’s condition was not immediately known.

Besides Ms. Rubin and Mr. Ferguson, at least two other journalists were aboard the aircraft, including Moises Saman, a freelance photographer on assignment for Time magazine.