The Islamic State militants after laying siege on the Yazidi populated areas of Sinjar reportedly executed dozens of boys as young as 12.
According to Amnesty International, the IS militants carried out targeted attacks against the minorities in Iraq that amounts to war crimes. The report noted that the militant group should be held responsible for displacement of over 80,000 Yazidis alone.
Besides abducting thousands of Yazidi women, the militant Sunni group took hundreds of men, including boys as young as 12 to the outskirts of their towns, where they they were all shot and killed, the Vice News report citing Amnesty noted.
The human rights group noted that the Islamic State has also taken dozens of young girls captive.
Amnesty that has denounced the actions of the IS stated that the militant Sunni group was carrying out a well-planned 'ethnic cleansing of minorities in Iraq.'
"The massacres and abductions being carried out by the Islamic State provide harrowing new evidence that a wave of ethnic cleansing against minorities is sweeping across northern Iraq," said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty's Senior Crisis Response Adviser.
"The Islamic State is carrying out despicable crimes and has transformed rural areas of Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims."
The Amnesty report noted that the Islamic State carried out its most brutal killings in Qiniyeh and Kocho, where the local residents tried to resist the militants.
A survivor of the Qiniyeh massacre, Fawas Safel, noted that he along with dozens of men were rounded up and taken near a gorge. The residents were then made to stand on the edge of the gorge and were then shot indiscriminately.
"They opened fire and some people tried to run away. I let myself fall in the hole, and others fell on top of me. I stayed still. After the continuous fire stopped, Islamic State militants fired individual shots at those they saw were not yet dead," he said.
Safel gave Amnesty a list of 28 men from his family who have been missing since then, who he believes have been killed.
Since its offensive began in Iraq, the Islamic State has targeted minority group such as Yazidis, Assyrian Christians, Shiite Turkmen, and Shabak, Kakais, and Sabean Mandaeans.
