The Islamic State group released more than 200 mostly elderly members of northern Iraq's Yazidi minority on Saturday who had been held for months, officials said.

The Yazidis were freed on the front line southwest of the city of Kirkuk and met by Kurdish peshmerga forces who brought them to a health center in Altun Kopri, on the road to the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil.

"These men and women had been held in Mosul," Khodr Domli, a leading Yazidi rights activist, said at the center. "We already have names for 196, and there could be some more.