Seven more Yazidis released from Islamic State captivity in 24 hours
Displaced children from the minority Yazidi sect, live at an unfinished house in Duhok province, northern Iraq, December 7, 2016. REUTERS/Ari Jalal
Kirkuk (IraqiNews.com) Seven more members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority have been released over the past 24 hours, a Kurdish official was quoted saying Tuesday.
Hussein Qaidi, an official of the Dohuk-based office in charge of Yazidi abductees, said a 30-year-old woman with her four children, another 24-year-old lady and an eight-year-old girl were released from Islamic State captivity in Syria.
Qaidi said the individuals would be handed over to their relatives once paperwork is finished in the office.
“All of those rescued are in need for psychological assistance, having been in Daesh (IS) grip since 2014,” said Qaidi.
A statistic released by the Kurdistan Region Government’s Endowments and Religious Affairs Ministry in July said Islamic State’s massacres of Yazidis forced nearly 360.000 of the religious minority to flee their areas. It said IS had kidnapped 6417 Yazidis since 2014, the report added. Those included 1102 women and 1655 children, the statistics show, adding that authorities had run into 43 mass graves of Yazidi victims slaughtered by IS,.
Islamic State massacred and enslaved thousands of Yazidis when they overran their Sinjar region, west of Nineveh.
In August, the United Nations said Yazidi atrocities under the Islamic State continued. “The genocide is ongoing and remains largely unaddressed, despite the obligation of States…to prevent and to punish the crime,” the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a report.
“Thousands of Yazidi men and boys remain missing and the terrorist group continues to subject some 3,000 women and girls in Syria to horrific violence including brutal daily rapes and beatings,” it added.