Iraq's Yazidis STILL trapped, hiding from ISIS in the mountains

No food. No water. And as they pass the hours in the scorching summer heat, no escape for 40,000 desperate people hiding in the mountains of northwestern Iraq from the killers surrounding them on the ground below.

When fighters from ISIS, which refers to itself as the Islamic State, stormed Sinjar over the weekend, the Yazidi minority who call the area home fled into the nearby mountains in fear of their lives. Some of them didn't make it.

"We heard sounds of mortars and in the morning they (Islamic militants) entered Sinjar," Zahra Jardo, a Yazidi woman who escaped the violence, told Reuters. "So we fled to the mountains, and those who stayed there are now suffering from thirst. They have no water. They also took girls and raped them. They said that Yazidis have to be converted to Islam."

The Yazidis, descendants of Kurds who follow an ancient pre-Islamic religion, have only bad options: continue to hide in the Sinjar Mountains and die of thirst, or come down from the mountains and be massacred by the radical Sunni militants who are forcing Islam or death on the communities they overtake as they sweep across Syria and Iraq.