Islamic State militants have threatened to kill more than 300 families from Iraq's Yazidi ethnic minority unless they convert to Islam, witnesses and a Yazidi lawmaker told Reuters on Saturday.
The families in the villages of Koja, Hatimiya and Qaboshi are surrounded by the Sunni militants who are mounting an offensive through northern Iraq which has sent tens of thousands of Yazidis and Christians fleeing for their lives, prompting international outrage.
Earlier in the day, Islamic State insurgents who seized Iraq's biggest dam in an offensive that has caused international consternation have brought in engineers for repairs, witnesses said on Saturday, as nervous Kurds stocked up on arms to defend their enclave nearby.
The jihadi Islamists have captured wide swathes of northern Iraq since June, executing non-Sunni Muslim captives, displacing tens of thousands of people and drawing the first US air strikes in the region since Washington withdrew troops in 2011.
After routing Kurdish forces earlier this week, Islamic State militants are just a 30-minute drive from Arbil, the Kurdish regional capital which had been spared sectarian fighting in other parts of Iraq for a decade.
Employees of foreign oil firms in Arbil were flying out. Kurds were snapping up AK-47 assault rifles in arms markets for fear of imminent attack, although these were ineffective against Islamic State fighters with superior firepower.
The Kurdistan Regional Government, meanwhile, has been lobbying Washington for more heavy weaponry and air support.
An engineer at Mosul dam told Reuters that Islamic State fighters had brought in engineers to repair an emergency power line to the city, Iraq's biggest in the north, that had been cut off four days ago, causing power outages and water shortages.
"They are gathering people to work at the dam," he said.
A dam administrator said that militants were putting up the trademark Islamic State black flags and patrolling with flatbed trucks mounted with machineguns to protect the facility they seized from Kurdish forces earlier this week.
On another note, the Pentagon said on Friday that US military aircraft dropped humanitarian aid to Iraqis under threat from hardline militants in northern Iraq for the second straight night.
"This airdrop was conducted from multiple airbases within the US Central Command area of responsibility and as with last night, included one C-17 and two C-130 cargo aircraft that together dropped a total of 72 bundles of supplies," the Pentagon said in a statement released late on Friday.
The cargo planes were accompanied by two F-18 fighter jets from the USS George H.W. Bush, a U.S. aircraft carrier positioned in the Gulf, it said.
The supplies included US military rations and drinking water.