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The Iraqi military helicopter was providing aid to Yazidi refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar after they fled Sunni militants when it crashed, killing the pilot.
Australian photographer Adam Ferguson was on the helicopter, but survived uninjured.
The 35-year-old spoke to the New York Times, who he was on assignment for, telling his colleagues that they crashed shortly after taking off with 20 to 25 evacuees.
"If we had been another 50 metres higher we'd all be dead," he said.
The helicopter landed upside down, leaving survivors crawling out of the wreckage.
The scene of a fatal helicopter crash, which crashed shortly after providing aid to Yazidi refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar (Image: Adam Ferguson, New York Times)
The Russian-built helicopter crashed after too many people tried to climb aboard.
"The helicopter delivered aid to the people stranded in Sinjar and too many people boarded it and it hit the mountain during takeoff," an Iraqi statement read.
New York Times reporter Alissa J Rubin, riding along on the helicopter for a story, suffered an apparent concussion and broken wrists in the crash.
A Yazidi member of Parliament was also among the injured.
Sunni militants from the Islamic State group on August 4 took the town of Sinjar in a remote region of Iraq near the Syrian border and gave the local Yazidi minority population an ultimatum to convert to Islam or die.
The scene of a fatal helicopter crash, which crashed shortly after providing aid to Yazidi refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar (Image: Adam Ferguson, New York Times)
‘It’s pretty dire’
Ferguson has been in Iraq for several days, documenting members of the Yazidi community as they remain stranded.
He told the New York Times that the situation was “pretty dire”.
“Everyone’s been quite worried about them dying out there on the mountain,” he said.
“On Saturday… there were thousands of people fleeing across the border, It was horrific, Many had lost family members in the mountains and watched people starve around them.”
It comes after the Pentagon said the evacuation of Yazidi off Mt Sinjar is more 'unlikely'.
"Based on this assessment, the interagency has determined that an evacuation mission is far less likely," Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said in a statement after US troops were flown onto the mountain to see the refugees' plight firsthand.
The UN refugee agency has said tens of thousands of civilians, many of them members of the Yazidi minority, remain trapped on the mountain by jihadists from the so-called Islamic State (ISIL), which has overrun large swaths of Iraq and Syria in a lightning and brutal offensive.
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