as one by the Royal Air Force. The U.N. Children's Fund -- UNICEF -- estimates that at least 20 flights would be needed to keep the thousands trapped alive for a week. France is also planning aid drops.

Crossroads of conflict

The Yazidis settled in the area around Sinjar in the 12th century. The mountains on which they now suffer had a special place in their beliefs. Yazidi tradition held that Noah's Ark had come to rest on the summit.

As a minority, they are no strangers to conflict and persecution. Through the ages, cultures, religions and ethnicities have competed and clashed in this part of Iraq. In the early 19th century, the Kurds, Arabs and Yazidis all had different names for Sinjar. Kurdish fighters invaded Yazidi lands, killing hundreds.

Frederick Forbes,a British colonial officer who visited the area in 1838, said the Yazidis had "kept the whole of the country between Mosul and Nisibin in a state of alarm" until being "pacified" by the Ottoman Empire.

When he reached the town of Sinjar, Forbes found a fertile place fed by mountain streams, but the "ruins of many Mohammedan buildings" recalled earlier battles.

Another colonial visitor, Gertrude Bell, wrote in the 1920s that "until a couple of years ago the Yezidis were ceaselessly at war with the Arabs and with everybody else."

Everybody else included the Turkish army, which had tried to force the Yazidis to convert to Islam in the last few years of the 19th century, a story told by the traveler Oswald Hutton Parry in his "Six Months in