Yazidi genocide evidence mounting against Islamic State: legal experts

Yazidi genocide evidence mounting against Islamic State: legal experts

Posted on May 5, 2017


LONDON,— Legal experts said on Thursday there was growing evidence to prove atrocities by Islamic State against Iraq’s Yazidi minority, including sexual slavery and mass killings, legally constitute genocide, which could help bring militants to justice if they ever go on trial.

In a report published in Human Rights Law Review, researchers found a “consistent and coordinated pattern” of crimes being committed against Yazidis and concluded that Islamic State clearly displayed “genocidal intent” against the minority group.

The researchers said it was important to collect and preserve such evidence since members of the Islamist militant group could go on trial for genocide in the future.

International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney last June said she aimed to prosecute the Islamist group through the International Criminal Court for their crimes against the Yazidi community.

Islamic State group captured on most parts of Sinjar district, home to around 400,000 Yazidis, in northwest Iraq on August 3, 2014 which led thousands of Kurdish families to flee to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.

Those who stay behind are subjected to brutal, genocidal acts: thousands killed, hundreds buried alive, and countless acts of rape, kidnapping and enslavement are perpetuated against Yazidi women. To add insult to injury, IS fighters ransack and destroy ancient Yazidi holy sites.

A total number of 7,000 Yazidi women, children and girls were abducted. The women are forced into sex slavery and are subjected to systematic rape. Even underage girls at the age of nine are not spared from sexual assault by the Islamic jihadists.

Thousands of captured men were killed in what a United Nations commission called a genocide against the Yazidis, a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. Islamic State considers them devil-worshippers.

“Genocide is at the apex of international crimes and has been described as the ‘crime of crimes’,” said co-author Aldo Zammit Borda, who is a law lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Britain.

“It is therefore hugely significant to be able to show that ISIL’s treatment of the Yazidis could be characterized as genocide,” he said, having analyzed reports by U.N. agencies, aid groups, media, and the militants themselves.

U.N. investigators estimate more than 5,000 Yazidis have been rounded up and slaughtered and some 7,000 women and girls forced into sex slavery.

Iraqi forces are now fighting to retake the city of Mosul, the militants’ last major stronghold in Iraq, where many Yazidis were held.

Some 600,000 Yazidis live in villages in Iraqi Kurdistan region and in Kurdish areas outside Kurdistan in around Mosul in Nineveh province, with additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, as their members having emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany.

There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide.

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