An untenable situation

DW: There are still many Yazidi refugees who fled Islamic State (IS) militants on Mount Sinjar. You travelled to the region, how would you describe the situation?

Michel Reimon: Imagine thousands of people sitting on desert mountain in temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees F). They have no source of water, no shade and are dying of thirst. Helicopters fly over, drop water and when they then briefly land, hundreds if not thousands of people run towards them.

They clamor to get on board and to be flown to safety. Soldiers do their best to help women and children inside, and to prevent the men from tipping the helicopters over. You can see it in the video I filmed there. It really is a dramatic situation. People are terrified they will die of thirst on the mountain, and they see the helicopters as their only chance of rescue.

The helicopters can only land for a few seconds. Soldiers stand in the doorway and do what they can to control the situation. I, along with two other people, was in the second row and tried to pull children on board, but before you know it, you're taking off again. People are half in and half out, and you try to pull then inside, and then off you go. A couple of days ago a helicopter was so overloaded that it crashed. The pilot died on Tuesday and the soldiers on board were all seriously injured.

The United States had announced a major evacuation operation, but the Pentagon has since back tracked on the grounds that the situation is not as bad as first thought. Having been there, how do you view that assessment?

If you watch my video, you can assess the situation for yourself. There is no point in using figures to argue the case is. Kurdish fighters are managing to rescue people at night, so the number of refugees is going down, and that is good news, but there are still thousands of people there and that would absolutely justify a rescue mission. Apart from that, they need more helicopters to take water to the mountain. That would help people up there survive for a few more days.

In the West, there is hot debate about whether to provide the Kurds in northern Iraq with arms. Having been there, would you say that is what is most needed in the region?

The most urgent need is humanitarian aid for the refugees. As a politician from a neutral country like Austria, I am not convinced about supplying weapons. We have an arms export ban, and if we are not authorized to arm them, it would be hard for us to advise other countries to do so. All I can say is that the local population is afraid and wants to defend itself against the fundamentalists. The call for arms is fairly unanimous.

Is the West doing enough to provide humanitarian aid?

If you consider the catastrophic scale of the situation, it is almost certainly not enough. Even before this new situation developed, there were 400,000 refugees in need of shelter across the region. I have seen aid organizations' internal documents, which depending on the conflict situation of the hour, report having to accommodate between 12,000 and 60,000 new refugees each day. That illustrates how the problem is getting worse by the day, so, yes, the West has to deliver more aid.

Michel Reimon has been an MEP for the Austrian Green Party since July 2014. He is a member of the delegation for relations with Iraq. He blogs about his experiences as a European politician and about his travels at www.reimon.net.