U.N.: Yazidi genocides under Islamic State continue
A displaced Iraqi child from the Yazidi community hold a juice after crossing the Syrian-Iraqi border at the Fishkhabur crossing, in northern Iraq. Archival photo.
Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Islamic State militants continue to commit genocides of the Iraqi Yazidi minority, a United Nations panel on Syria said Thursday, returning a spotlight to the dilemma of the religious group that sustained some of the brutalist human rights violations under the extremist group.
“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.
The commission’s remarks came hours after an official report by the Kurdistan Region Government said that Islamic State militants had killed 1293 members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority since they took over Iraqi territories in 2014.
A statistic released by the Kurdistan Region Government’s Endowments and Religious Affairs Ministry said Islamic State’s massacres of Yazidis forced nearly 360.000 of the religious minority to flee their areas, with 90.000 of those heading abroad.
IS kidnapped 6417 Yazidis since 2014, the report added. Those include 1102 women and 1655 children, the statistics show.
The calamity rendered 2645 kids parentless, including 220 whose parents are still under IS captivity, the ministry revealed.
Authorities have run into 43 mass graves of Yazidi victims slaughtered by IS, according to the statistic.
Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, Hejji Kandour al-Sheikh, had stated that tens of thousands of Yazidis had failed to return to their home regions due to “political conflicts among parties trying to control those regions. He also noted that 2000 women and children of his community had been transferred by the militants to the town of Tal Afar, west of Nineveh, and the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s base there.
Iraq’s judicial authorities had formed a special panel to probe massacres of Yazidis.
Islamic State militants considered Yazidis, whose beliefs combine elements of several Middle Eastern religions, devil worshipers. The United Nations had recognized IS actions against the sect as crimes against humanity.