Another night on Mt Sinjar

The lights of their home towns, now controlled by terrorist jihadists, twinkle beneath them in the moonlight.

The people on the mountain can see their villages and the headlights of vehicles of the jihadi patrols snaking through the streets they have abandoned and know they cannot return to.

Small campfires light up the side of the mountain, extending towards the Syrian border, just visible in the distance.

This is where the Yazidis now eke out their lives - desperately searching for a safe place to sleep, and for food and water.

Around the campfires, the refugees, a bedraggled spectacle of humanity, sit making tea in empty bean cans torn in half. It is one of the few luxuries they still have.

As the sun rises, fighter jets can be heard overhead. Any hope that they bring some kind of salvation disappears as they roar off into the distance. They are protecting the front lines near the Kurdish capital, Erbil, a city full of five-star hotels, the comforts of which must seem light years away from the circumstances of the Yazidis' own impoverished lives.

As dawn rises, no one knows when aid is coming, or whether any is coming.

Another day of temperatures above 37C, and not enough water to drink, is beginning.

It reveals thousands of impoverished, exhausted and hungry people sleeping rough on the hard ground, speckled with the jagged rocks that smashed so many of the water bottles dropped from above.

Nights are spent trying to get some uncomfortable rest as preparation for the next day's search for water. The only water already on the mountainside is in the troughs left for the goats - filthy and full of droppings.

"The big problem here is diarrhoea," said Hussein Marqat, 52, a doctor.

The only food for the refugees is under-cooked or raw meat from the goats that roam the mountain, and whatever can be scrounged from the aid drops. There is too little fire-wood for cooking.

"We're reduced to eating raw meat," said Thasen Khaleh, 35.

Thus it was all day: a perpetual chase of desperate people pursuing any hope of rescue.