The Islamic State (IS) group has released more than 200 mostly elderly members of northern Iraq's Yazidi minority who had been held for months.
The Yazidis were freed on the frontline southwest of the city of Kirkuk and met by Kurdish peshmerga forces who brought them to a health centre in Altun Kopri, on the road to the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil.
According to officials from Kirkuk and Arbil, the group was moved from Mosul via Hawija and freed at the Khaled entrance to Kirkuk on Saturday.
Dozens of Kurdish doctors and nurses provided emergency care at the Altun Kopri health centre, where Yazidis who had heard the news started to mass at the gates, hoping to be reunited with missing relatives.
IS spearheaded a June offensive that began in Mosul and overran much of Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad, sweeping security forces aside.
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After driving south toward Baghdad, IS again turned its attention to the north, pushing Kurdish forces back, killing and capturing thousands of Yazidis and twice besieging others on Mount Sinjar.
Officials told AFP the mass release, the largest of its kind, took them by surprise and said there had been no co-ordination with IS.
"IS must have decided that they could no longer feed them, look after them. They were a burden," said Domli.
"IS saw that there was no benefit for them in keeping these old people," said Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament who made a poignant appeal to the international community for assistance in August.
