Yazidi UPDATES genocide has occurred and is ongoing

[Anthea]

3,735 Yezidis still in ISIS captivity

At least 3,735 Yezidis are still under Islamic State (ISIS) captivity, said an official, noting that efforts are ongoing to free them from the radical group.

“The number of those who have not escaped is 3,735 persons. Our efforts are to free all of them from ISIS,” Khairi Bozani, head of Yezidi affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government's religious affairs ministry, told Rudaw.

When ISIS attacked and controlled Shingal in August 2014, it took 6,413 Yezidis captive, including women, children, and the elderly, and killed hundreds of their men.

Of the 6,413, Bozani revealed, 3,443 were women and girls.

“Around 2,678 have been freed or escaped, including 971 women, 327 men, 690 boys and 690 girls.”

In the beginning, many Yezidis managed to escape on their own. But as time passed, escape became more difficult, so many rescue networks were set up in the Kurdistan Region to free them.

Many were freed from ISIS via payment of ransoms.

The United Nations reported in June that ISIS had earned some $45 million from ransoms paid for Yezidi captives by their families, suggesting that the money families paid end up in the coffers of the organization.

At the time, Bozani disputed the report and asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to clarify where this money had come from and where it had gone. The UN then issued a clarification, stating that the figure also included estimates of external donations to the terrorist group in addition to ransoms paid by families of hostages.

To run the affairs of the Yezidi escapees, the KRG set up an office for them in Duhok.

Nadia Murad, who was one of the victims of the ISIS atrocities against the Yezidis and was held captive by the group, became the voice of all the Yezidis after she was appointed goodwill ambassador for the United Nations.

http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/27092016

[Anthea]

ISIS Genocide of Yazidis:
‘Girls As Young as 9 Were Raped, As Were Pregnant Women’

The Islamic radicals that comprise ISIS are committing genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria and, according to the United Nations, women and girls as young as nine are being sold as slaves to ISIS soldiers who regularly beat them and rape them, re-sell them, and, if they try to escape, kill them.

As the U.N. Human Rights Council has reported, “While held by ISIS fighters, Yazidi women and girls over the age of nine are subjected to brutal sexual violence. Most of those interviewed reported violent daily rapes by their fighter-owners. Some were handcuffed behind their backs during the rapes while others had their hands and legs tied to the corners of the beds.”

“Little, if anything, protects against rape,” said the U.N. “Girls as young as nine were raped, as were pregnant women.”

The U.N. Human Rights Council published its report in June, They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis, and it states, “ISIS has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis….”

The U.S. and British governments have officially declared that ISIS’s actions constitute genocide.

The U.N. report focuses on the Islamic State’s attack on Yazidi villages in Sinjar (northern Iraq) in August 2014 and the subsequent genocide of the Yazidi people, which has included mass murder, beheadings, the rape of women and children, and the buying and selling of women and girls as sex slaves at marketplaces and online.

The report, based on 45 interviews with survivors, medical personnel, and journalists, says “over 3,200 Yazidi women and children are still held by ISIS. Most are in Syria where Yazidi females continue to be sexually enslaved and Yazidi boys, indoctrinated, trained and used in hostilities. Thousands of Yazidi men and boys are missing. The genocide of the Yazidis is on-going.”

In the report there is a section entitled “ISIS treatment of Yazidi women and girls aged 9 and above.” This section details what happened to Yazidi women in the first day of the attacks (Aug. 3, 2014) and what subsequently occurred as the women were transferred to various holding sites in Iraq and Syria and sold as slaves. Listed below are some of the facts and statements concerning the fate of those women and girls.

Fighters separated married females from unmarried females. Only girls aged eight years and under were allowed to remain with their mothers.

Mass killing. In the early hours of 16 August 2014, ISIS executed older women (who were approximately 60 years and older) from Kocho at the Solagh Technical Institute.

Holding sites. Interviewees reported being given food with insects in it and having to drink water out of the toilets. Many, particularly infants and young children, became very sick. No medical care was provided.

ISIS brought in a female gynecologist in an effort to identify single females who had falsely declared themselves to be married.

The selection of any girl was accompanied by screaming as she was forcibly pulled from the room, with her mother and any other women who tried to keep hold of her being brutally beaten by fighters.

Some [women and girls] committed suicide at holding sites in Tel Afar, Mosul and in Raqqah city.

At the main holding site in Raqqah city, a Yazidi girl attempted to kill herself by throwing herself from the second floor of the building. Severely injured, ISIS fighters forbade the other Yazidi captives from helping her.

Some women and girls killed themselves by cutting their wrists or throats, while others hanged themselves using their headscarves.

Captured Yazidi women and girls are deemed property of ISIS and are openly termed sabaya or slaves.

ISIS sells Yazidi women and girls in slave markets, or souk sabaya, or as individual purchases to fighters who come to the holding centres.

In the last year, ISIS fighters have started to hold online slave auctions, using the encrypted Telegraph application to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls, with details of their age, marital status, current location and price.

In Syria, slave markets were held in “the farm” in Raqqah city, and in buildings in Al-Bab, Al-Shaddadi, Al-Mayadin and Tadmur. A central committee, the Committee for the Buying and Selling of Slaves, organizes the Yazidi slave markets.

A woman, sold at a slave market at “the farm” in Raqqah city, recounted, “ISIS would buy and sell girls there. There was a raised area we had to stand on. If we refused, the fighters would beat us with wooden sticks. There were maybe 200 Yazidi girls there. The youngest was between seven and nine years old. Most were quite young.”

Prices for the Yazidi women and girls ranged between $200 and $1,500 depending on marital status, age, number of children, and beauty.

One ISIS fighter bought a woman at the slave auction in Raqqah in 2015. On placing her in his car, he told her “You are like a sheep. I have bought you.” He sold her seven days later to an Algerian ISIS fighter living in Aleppo.

Once ISIS sells a Yazidi woman and girl, the purchasing fighter receives complete rights of ownership and can resell, gift, or will his “slave” as he wishes.

Girls as young as nine were raped, as were pregnant women.

ISIS fighters threatened Yazidi women and girls, saying any resistance on their part would be punished by gang rape.

A Yazidi woman bought by a Saudi recounted, “[H]e raped me every day that I was with him…. He told me that if I did not let him do this thing to me that he would bring four or five men and they would all take turns raping me. I had no choice. I wanted to die.”

Another woman, held in Minbej (Aleppo), was told by her Syrian fighter- owner that if she resisted, he would throw her off the roof of his house. Some women also reported that the fighter threatened to sell or beat their children.

ISIS fighters routinely beat Yazidi women and girls in their possession.

One woman, held in northern Syria, reported that her fighter-owner killed several of her children after an escape attempt. The fighter continued to hold and rape her for over six months after her children’s deaths.

Fighters also order and supervise the gang rapes of Yazidi women and girls who try to escape. A woman, unmarried and in her early 20s, was held by ISIS for over a year during which she was sold nine times.

Purchased by a fighter in Minbej, she attempted to escape. When she was caught, he dragged her back to the house where he and several other fighters raped and beat her.

An 18-year-old Yazidi girl bought by a Libyan was raped daily throughout her time with this fighter, and described being forced to take [birth control] pills every day. Held in ISIS captivity for over a year, she was sold eight times and raped hundreds of times, before being sold back to her family for over 20,000 US dollars.

Some Yazidi women [pregnant by rape] gave birth in captivity or upon release but many appear to have given the infants away in circumstances that remain unclear. None of the birth control methods forced upon the Yazidi women and girls protected them from sexually transmitted diseases.

In addition to the physical wounds and scars, most Yazidi women and girls spoke of thoughts of suicide, of being unable to sleep due to nightmares about ISIS fighters at their door. “I wish I was dead. I wish the ground would open and kill me and my children,” said one woman, held for 17 months.

Women and girls who were rescued or sold back are consumed by thoughts of their missing husbands, fathers and brothers, and by the distress of not knowing the locations and fate of young sons taken for training and/or daughters who were sold into sexual slavery and remain in the hands of ISIS.

One Yazidi woman, in her early 20s and married with children, has over 20 members of her family missing, including most of her close male relatives.

Link to Full Report:

http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies ... P.2_en.pdf

[Anthea]

Yazidi survivors of ISIS abuse 'neglected by international community'

Yazidi women and girls who have escaped enslavement and rape by Islamic State militants are being failed by a lack of support, Amnesty International says.

Thousands of members of the religious minority were abducted in Iraq in 2014.

The hundreds who have so far escaped captivity have ended up living in dire conditions with impoverished relatives or at camps, according to Amnesty.

Several have attempted suicide or have sisters or children who took their own lives due to the abuse they endured.

Amnesty said much more needed to be done to ensure they received the necessary care and support they urgently required to rebuild their lives.

In August 2014, ISIS militants rounded up of Yazidis living in Iraq's north-western Sinjar region, where the majority of the world's Yazidi population was based.

Men and boys over the age of 12 were separated from women and girls and shot if they refused to convert to Islam.

Women and other children often witnessed the killings before being forcibly transferred to locations in Iraq and Syria, where some 3,800 are estimated to remain in captivity.

UN human rights investigators say the women and girls as young as nine were treated as "spoils of war" and openly sold in slave markets or handed over as "gifts".

Survivors who escaped told the investigators that they had endured brutal rapes, often on a daily basis.

Amnesty's researchers interviewed 18 survivors during a visit to Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in August 2016, who said they had experienced bouts of severe depression as well as anger and suicidal thoughts.

Seveh, who was 17 when she was abducted with her mother and four siblings, said she was raped and assaulted repeatedly in captivity, and that her captors also beat her three-month-old baby and periodically starved them. She tried to kill herself three times, but other captives stopped her.

Amnesty said Seveh continued to suffer severe physical and psychological consequences from her ordeal and remained distressed about her younger sister, Nermeen, who killed herself after her own escape.

Nermeen set herself on fire inside a cabin at a camp for internally displaced people. She was rushed to hospital, but died three days later.

"In the hospital, I asked her why she did it and she said she could not take it anymore. She was in pain all the time, she cried all the time," Nermeen's mother Shirin told Amnesty, adding that the family had repeatedly requested for her to receive specialised therapy abroad.

As well as psychological counselling, Amnesty said many survivors were in need of financial assistance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37607779

[Anthea]

3,800 are estimated to remain in captivity

While almost the entire world is playing crazy war games in the middle east

NOBODY

Has attempted to rescue the Yazidis

3,800

innocent Yazidis being tortured and raped time after time and nobody cares

and the entire world allows this to continue

[Anthea]

Merkel says should consider protected zones for Yazidis in northern Iraq

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday plans should be considered to give Yazidis in Iraq protected areas to retreat to in the north of the country.

"The plans are not finished yet, I'll be honest with you, but they are on the agenda," Merkel told a conference of the youth wing of her conservatives, adding that the survival of the Yazidis was at stake.

United Nations investigators said in June that Islamic State was committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes.

Merkel said it was necessary to think about how the Yazidis driven out of their homes by the Islamic State could be given a "safe space" to which they could return once Islamic State was defeated.

She said it was necessary to talk to the Yazidis and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq about that.

Yazidi community leaders have already asked to have international protection for a self-rule administration that they demand to have in their region in northern Iraq, as part of the Iraqi state.

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. They are considered infidels by the hardline Sunni Islamist militants.

[Anthea]

Dozens of Yazidi women captured and enslaved by ISIS in 2014 have been moved from the Iraqi city of Mosul to Syria, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The monitoring group and US military officials have said ISIS militants are fleeing Mosul and heading for Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital of ISIS, as Iraqi-led forces push to free the key Iraqi city from the terror group.

Dozens of ISIS families have already arrived in Raqqa, the observatory said.

Ethnic cleansing by ISIS has displaced, killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Yazidis, members of an ancient ethnic and religious minority. Modern-day Iraq is the traditional homeland of the Yazidis.

Islamic militants captured thousands of Yazidi women and children, and killed the men. ISIS claims the Quran justifies taking non-Muslim women and girls captive and permits them to be raped -- an assertion denied by Islamic scholars.

The Yazidis believe in a single god who created the Earth and left it in the care of a fallen angel, and they have been subjected to large-scale persecution by ISIS.

The United Nations has accused ISIS of committing genocide against the Yazidis.

In June, a UN report estimated that ISIS holds about 3,500 slaves and that the terror group continues to subject women and children to sexual violence, particularly in the form of sexual slavery. The report said ISIS' actions "may, in some instances, amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide."

In Iraq, ISIS secured large sums from ransom payments and the sale of slaves, especially young Yazidi women. In 2014, ISIS made about $20 million from ransom payments, the US Treasury estimates.
Yazidis are of Kurdish descent, and their religion is considered a pre-Islamic sect that draws from Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

They have long suffered persecution, with many Muslims referring to them as devil worshippers.
Most of the 500,000 Yazidis live in and around Sinjar in northwestern Nineveh province, bordering Iraq's Kurdish region.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/20/middl ... index.html

[Anthea]

Why a Yazidi Woman in Iraq Named Her Newborn Son Trump

As the votes were being counted throughout the United States Tuesday night, a Yazidi woman in Iraq was in labor, finally giving birth to a baby boy an hour before Donald Trump was declared the winner. An hour later, mom and dad named their beautiful child “Trump.”

This story begins over two years ago, when the same Yazidi mother was pregnant with her first child and ISIS attacked the village where she and her husband (names withheld due to safety concerns) planned to raise their family. Running for their lives, they escaped to Sinjar Mountain where they, along with thousands of others, were stranded with no food or water for seven days. Lacking the essentials and surrounded by ISIS, the mother gave birth to Dilbreen in that mountain camp on January 4, 2015.

One year to the day later, Dilbreen was asleep in a tent, with thousands of other displaced Yazidis, when a gas heater malfunctioned and a fire broke out. With mom outside baking bread for her son’s birthday, she was unable to protect him from the burning plastic ceiling that melted and fell on the child.

Dilbreen was lucky to survive, but had to endure the pain and disfiguration caused by severe burns to his face.

The Yazidis are mostly a forgotten people. Nearly a year ago, the world watched in horror as ISIS attacked a Paris nightclub. When the carnage ended, 130 people were dead and over 350 more injured. At exactly the same time, 2,500 miles away, ISIS was slaughtering Yazidi men, women and children in the Iraqi town of Sinjar — scene of the infamous Sinjar massacre 15 months earlier, in which 200,000 Yazidis were driven from their homes and 50,000 fled for their lives to the Sinjar Mountains.

At the time, I told that story in the Observer and introduced to the world a courageous Yazidi woman named Adlay Kejjan, who works with the pro-Israel organization StandWithUS and a cross-section of religious communities to bring awareness to the plight of the Yazidis.

With the help of other Yazidis living in the US, Kejjan has launched the nonprofit Yazidi American Women Organization on behalf of thousands of women and girls enslaved by ISIS. Because of their efforts, Dilbreen is getting the care he needs.

“Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston agreed to do reconstructive surgeries on Dilbreen’s face. The UK’s Road to Peace organization brought Dilbreen to the United States,” explained Kejjan. “After surgery on his chin and bottom lip, Dilbreen can now close his mouth and eat food.”

Kejjan continued, “Dilbreen needs many more surgeries on his face…with everyone’s help and prayers, we hope to get him better fast.”

Dilbreen’s injury is all too common in the Yazidi camps. “The only source of warmth these families have are these dangerous small gas heaters and it’s commonplace for their tents to catch fire,” explained Kejjan. “There are hundreds of children who desperately need medical attention for their burns and surgery to repair disfigurement. Right now, the Yazidi American Women Organization does not have the resources to come close to helping every child in need.”

Earlier this year, Kejjan visited Iraq for six weeks to see the current plight of her people for herself – a suffering that gets little attention from a world focused only on Syrian refugees.

When Kejjan returned to the United States, she became Dilbreen’s guardian. His father, mother and baby brother Trump hope to join him in America soon.

“We have been going through a never-ending genocide over the last two years at the hands of ISIS, and Obama failed to take out ISIS or help liberate the thousands of Yazidi women and children that are still enslaved by ISIS,” said the father of Dilbreen and Trump, translated by Kejjan. “I hope President Trump will at last take out ISIS so we can return home and rebuild our lives.”

ISIS is reportedly holding 3,200 Yazidi women and girls as sex slaves. Over 5,000 have been killed and 400,000 displaced by the terror group. These numbers reflect only the towns liberated by Yazidi and Kurdish fighters backed by US- and British-led coalition air strikes.

According to Kejjan, death tolls are reflected in mass graves found after towns are liberated. Less than half of Yazidi towns have been liberated. If and when the rest are set free, the death toll and the number of kidnapped and injured are expected to rise dramatically.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/11/13/w ... son-trump/

[Anthea]

Priest investigates plight of Iraq's Yazidis

As he watched the television images of terrified Yazidi women and children fleeing Islamic State militants in northern Iraq, a familiar unease gripped the Rev. Patrick Desbois.

There were no men among the fleeing villagers. That, he told himself, was genocide unfolding before his eyes.

Though Desbois had never heard of the Yazidis, the 2014 images stirred a spiritual calling to investigate the mass killings and other atrocities inflicted on the non-Muslim religious minority and raise awareness of a little-known ethnic group that has suffered so profoundly.

Fighters of the Islamic State, also known by its Arabic acronym, Daesh, killed an estimated 5,000 Yazidi men when it took control of Iraq's northwest two years ago, according to the United Nations and human-rights groups. Thousands of Yazidi women and children were taken captive. The women often were raped and sold as sex slaves or servants; the boys were forced to convert to Islam and become soldiers of the Islamic State.

Although the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar has since been liberated, about 3,500 women, girls and some men remain captives of the terrorist group, according to a recent U.N. report. The majority are Yazidis. The abuses, the report suggests, "may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide."

Desbois already has built a reputation as a self-made mass-murder sleuth. Through Yahad-In Unum, the organization he founded in 2004 to uncover and denounce genocide, he had identified largely unrecognized sites where the Nazis slaughtered and buried Jews and Roma, also called Gypsies, in the former Soviet Union.

But the murderous treatment of the Yazidis presented a real-time cause.

That opening materialized unexpectedly. On business in Brussels in the winter of 2015 and searching for a barber, Desbois stepped into the only open shop he could find -- one run by Arabs. When the priest told the barber that he was interested in learning more about the tragic Yazidi situation, the man whispered in his ear that he was a Yazidi.

The barber and his family helped initiate the primary contacts that Desbois needed to begin his mission, and two months later the priest was on his way to northern Iraq.

Today, through a project called Action Yazidis, Desbois collects testimony from survivors who escaped slavery and imprisonment by the Islamic State group. The accounts are pieced together through interviews that are cross-referenced with separate statements, photographs and other sources and written material.

Every nugget of information comes from the victims: What day, date and time did the Islamic State fighters arrive? Where exactly were you -- in the house, in the yard, at school? Were you alone? Who was with you?

"I couldn't just stay on the mass killings of the past," said Desbois, 61, a former mathematics teacher and government worker. "But I had no door to enter into Iraq."

The survivors are asked to draw details of what they remember: An illustration of the camp where they were held, where they entered, whether they could sit down, the number of seats. The interviews last hours.

The goal is not only to document the horrors but also "to rebuild the topography from the first day of being captured to the day of escape," Desbois said.

Each story paints a grim picture of the Islamic State's methodology. The militants typically arrive toting three bags: one to collect money from their captives, one for jewelry and the third for cellphones. Desbois was familiar with the tactic; the Nazis also stole from their victims.

Families are separated. Newborns are taken from mothers and given to Muslim families. Boys, many as young as 9, are taken to prison, forced to convert to Islam and sent to terrorist training camps to learn to shoot Kalashnikov rifles, fire rockets and -- if necessary -- blow themselves up.

Girls are examined to determine whether they have entered womanhood, Desbois said. Virgins are sold to the highest bidder. Young mothers are forced to become servants. Older women are saved for use as human shields against attacks.

"In Daesh everyone has a purpose," Desbois said.

One 42-year-old woman who spent almost two years in Islamic State captivity with her four children recalled one fighter breaking her 6-year-old son's teeth and laughing at him, and then hitting her 10-year-old daughter so hard she urinated.

"He would beat my children up and lock them up in a room," the woman told Amnesty International. "They would cry inside and I would sit outside the door crying. I begged him to kill us, but he said he didn't want to go to hell because of us."

Her account, as well as those of 17 other women and girls who survived Islamic State captivity, was published in a recent Amnesty International report that concludes victims are in desperate need of financial assistance and psychological counseling.

Last year, dozens of Yazidis committed or attempted suicide in northern Iraq's Kabarto refugee camp, according to Alex Bartoloni, Baghdad-based community health manager for International Medical Corps, a Los Angeles humanitarian medical group.

"We had never seen this level of suicide in another refugee population," said Bartoloni, whose group provides mental-health and psycho-social support for about 30,000 displaced Yazidis in the camp. "It was quite shocking to us."

Although the number of suicides has decreased in recent months, Bartoloni said the level of anxiety, depression and extreme distress had "taken a large toll on family dynamics."

Among Yazidis, there is a sense the world has turned its back on them. Or, worse, is not even aware of what is happening.

Mirza Ismail, chairman of the Canada-based Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International, called on people in the West to press their governments "to stand for accountability and justice."

Ismail's group wants the world to acknowledge that Yazidis, a predominantly ethnic Kurdish religious minority that is widely believed to have suffered 74 genocides throughout its history, are being targeted solely because they are non-Muslims.

"What has the West done to save the non-Muslim minorities, if anything at all?" Ismail asked.

Gulie Khalaf, treasurer of Yezidis International, a nonprofit based in Lincoln, Neb., which is thought to have the largest Yazidi population in the U.S., stressed the importance of survivors keeping their stories alive by sharing testimony.

"They are documents to help study and understand what happened and how and why we failed to protect hundreds of thousands of people," said Khalaf, whose group works to educate the public about the Yazidis. "It holds the authorities accountable for their actions and future action. It helps lawmakers make better decisions for prevention of genocides."

Desbois said the first step toward justice is capturing and punishing Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has exploited the world's seeming indifference toward the plight of the Yazidis.

"If we begin not to care about the genocide of people we don't know about, we open the door for much worse," Desbois said.

http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2016/nov/ ... iraq-s-ya/

[Anthea]

ISIS ousted from Yazidi villages west of Mosul by Kurdish-Yazidi force

A mixed Kurdish and Yazidi armed force said on Monday it had dislodged Islamic State (IS) militants from five Yazidi villages west of Mosul in an offensive that began on Saturday.

It coincided with a larger, ongoing Iraqi government and Kurdish offensive to recapture Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, from IS with aerial support from the U.S.-led military coalition. Iranian-backed Shi'ite Muslim militias are also in the Mosul campaign, battling IS to the west of the city.

Islamic State overran the five villages in 2014 when it swept over Sinjar mountain and the surrounding region inhabited by Yazidis, killing, capturing and enslaving thousands from the Iraqi religious minority.

U.S.-backed Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces took back Sinjar in 2015 but the area south of the mountain remained in the hands of the ultra-hardline Sunni Muslim militants.

The offensive launched by the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) aims to take back all Yazidi villages south of Sinjar, the group's administrative chief, Hassan Saeed, told Reuters.

Saeed, a Yazidi, said the offensive had not been coordinated with Shi'ite militias known as the Popular Mobilisation.

The YBS is affiliated with Turkey's Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its military operations could upset Ankara, which has said it will not allow Sinjar to become a base for the group.

The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is classified as a terrorist group by Ankara, the European Union and the United States.

Yazidis speak Kurmanji, the same language as the Kurds of Syria and Turkey. Their beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions.

The Nineveh region surrounding Mosul is a mosaic of ethnic and religious communities - Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, Sunnis, Shi'ites - though Sunni Arabs comprise the overwhelming majority.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... 39218?il=0

[Anthea]

'We wanted to kill each other so we wouldn't get raped'

Female Yazidi fighters recall horrifying accounts of ISIS genocide as they join the men fighting on the Iraqi frontline

The women say they are ready to die to get revenge for their families

Speak candidly about being tortured and raped daily by their captors

Their accounts are featured in Stacey Dooley's BBC Three documentary where the presenter spends two weeks with the women at their camp

In 2014, 50,000 Yazidi people fled their homes and were killed or captured by ISIS it what the UN called the ‘largest mass kidnapping this century’

Weeping teenage girls hug their bodies and cling on to their friends as they recall their own unimaginable accounts of torture, rape and massacred at the hands of ISIS.

They share the gruesome details of wanting desperately to kill themselves to escape the daily horror with BBC Three presenter Stacey Dooley, as part of her documentary Stacey on the Frontline: Guns, Girls and ISIS.

The extraordinary all–female Yazidi battalion, are fuelled to take revenge against the so-called Islamic State for a 2014 attack the UN condemned as the ‘largest mass kidnapping this century’.

Inas, a 17-year-old Peshmarga soldier, allows Stacey - who filmed the documentary in September - to visit with her family who escaped capture after the teen shielded her father with her own body before being tortured herself for ten days.

A close family member of Inas', who remains anonymous, cracks with raw emotion as she tells Stacey of the moment ISIS stormed their homes.

‘Everybody ran in different directions. They beat us, for three or four months we were kept there without enough food. Then they put us on buses and took us to outside Mosul. We could not see anything but darkness.

‘They ordered us to wash in preparation for raping. They brought us nightdresses as if we were their wives.

'None of us touched the clothes except for one of the girls, she said "I will go and freshen up". She went and cut both of her wrists. The blood came under the toilet door. After that two ISIS members wrapped the body with a blanket and threw her outside, later on we saw dogs eating her insides.

‘We all wanted to kill each other so that we wouldn’t get raped, but we couldn’t do it because we were handcuffed to beds.

'One of the girls was nine years old, they raped her in front of our eyes. An Arab from Tal-Afar bought me for less than a dollar, he would often rape me. Even when I smile and laugh now, I still remember the awful time I went through. Before I laugh or after I laugh these images are in front of my eyes.'

As the battle to take nearby Mosul out of ISIS hands moves into its final phase in Northern Iraq, in this extraordinary film for BBC Three Stacey finds these young women’s lives have been transformed by a desire to avenge against ISIS and shows what daily life is like in these war zones.

One fearless ISIS survivor, called Nadia, tells the presenter: 'I saw the women in the army here they are so strong. So I decided to be strong as well and join them. I have to become a martyr to get revenge.'

In 2014 50,000 Yazidi people fled their ancestral lands in Northern Iraq to Mount Sinjar away from the advance of ISIS.

Without food and water thousands died on the mountain and the ones left behind were massacred or captured. More than 5,000 women were taken to be used as sex slaves, with an estimated 2,000 women remaining captivity.

Stacey meets cadets at their training camp, a former secondary school, as they prepare to join the ranks of this powerful military force.

She then journeys with them in their military get up to the frontline as they prepare to fight and join the men already fighting against ISIS

One harrowing recollection told by renowned Yazidi singer Xate Shingali, was one of the reasons she turned herself into a soldier and founded the battalion of Yazidi women.

She breaks down in tears as she tells a horrified Stacey about a young mother who she encountered after the massacre: 'I met a women who had been captured by ISIS. She told me she had been kidnapped with her one year old baby.

'The ISIS leader didn’t allow her to feed the baby for three days. The baby kept crying and crying. The leader said to her "You’re baby is annoying and won’t let me sleep". "The woman answered… ‘We are prisoners and we are hungry and thirsty’.

‘The leader said… "Give it to me, I will feed it". He grabbed the baby from the chest, pulled up his head and with the sword beheaded him.

'The ISIS men took the body to the kitchen and cooked it, then they brought it to the mother and, holding her by the sword they said to her… "Eat the flesh of your baby".'

A troubled Stacey adds: 'The horror stories that these girls come out with are beyond belief.

‘I'm feeling quite overwhelmed and underestimated the roots of pure evil. And what life is like for these women.'

These female fighters strike fear into the heart of the Jihadists as they believe if they are killed by a woman they will not make it the heavenly afterlife.

Xati explains: ‘They’ve made this belief up themselves, that if a woman kills them, they will not go to heaven. So we go to fight them at the frontlines. To kill 1,000 ISIS soldiers and stop them from entering paradise.’

As the women complete their training they journey from their secondary camp to where the men have set up a base and are shooting at enemies, with mortar dropping minutes after Stacey arrives.

The presenter, who has made 50 films for the BBC, very nearly loses her cool when she hears mortar falling and gunshots being fired: ‘You have to tell me when that is going to happen. Jesus Christ! There was no warning, I didn’t realise they were shooting. I thought it was them coming for us.’

But it's clear that the men are certain the women have a place on the frontline and welcome them to fight alongside them.

‘They fight on the trenches like us, before we did not have this power. If these girls had been able to shoot weapons before ISIS attacked us, then maybe ISIS would not have been able to take over Sinjar.

'Now women and men… we all fight equally as one. The girls can be even more powerful and stronger than us. They are great fighters.'

STACEY DOOLEY REFLECTS ON HER TIME ON THE FRONTLINE

‘What I will take from this trip, when I came home, I said this, it sounds really "right on" but, I will never take for granted what a privilege it is to live in a society where we’re not constantly frightened all of the time,' Stacey explained at a screening of her film 'Stacey on the frontline: Guns, girls and ISIS'.

‘It’s so surreal, it’s like waking up and for the first three or five seconds I didn’t remember where I was. For those three or five seconds I wasn’t scared and then as soon as I remembered I was instantly scared again.

'This is two and a half weeks, the girls have been living like this for two and a half years. That is something I will never forget. Being on the frontline, that was just so surreal.

'Some of them have lost every single person that they loved and they are just human beings. There were sometimes when they really wanted to talk and you would just run with it and there were other times when they would burst into floods of tears and they wouldn’t even be coherent so it was just picking as and when these conversations were had.'

‘I was saying to the girls, that you like to think that you would do the admirable thing. Well what you would assume to be the admirable thing, to kind of stand up for what you believe in.

'But the reality is it feels impossible for these girls for so much of the time. I wanted to make this film as well because I think people are so hostile towards people that are coming into this country fleeing war and it is just luck of the draw in terms of where you were born.

'You can’t help but compare yourself and put yourself in their situation… I would like to think I would be brave enough to stay and fight, but in reality I am not as strong as them girls. But that’s why I think it’s so important that we are so welcoming to people that are trying to rebuild their lives.'

‘I’m desperate now to continue telling stories that are really important. I think especially the world at the moment is so nuts, and war is ruining so many people’s lives...

'When you’re at home making a cup of tea and it comes on the news it kind of passes you by and the numbers and images feel so, so far away.

'But I think when it’s emotive and you put a human in front of you and say tell us your story it kind of highlights and emphasises how nuts this is and how important it is. Yeah I would like to continue making things like this.'

Link to Article - Photos:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... tline.html

[Anthea]

'They raped me until I fainted': Yazidi women who were sexually assaulted hundreds of times while kept as ISIS slaves are awarded human rights prize

Lamiya Aji Bashar, 18, and Nadia Murad, 23, were captured in northern Iraq
They endured horrific abuse by jihadists before they managed to escape
The pair were today presented the Sakharov Prize for human rights
Lamiya said the award was 'for every woman and girl who has been sexually enslaved' by ISIS

Two women who were captured and traded between ISIS fantatics as sex slaves, enduring horrific sexual abuse, have been awarded a top human rights prize.

Lamiya Aji Bashar, 18, and Nadia Murad, 23, said they would continue to be a voice for for those suffering a similar fate when they accepted the Sakharov Prize for human rights.

They were captured by jihadists when the Iraqi area of Sinjar fell to the extremists in August 2014.



Lamiya said the EU's top human rights prize was one 'for every woman and girl who has been sexually enslaved' by ISIS.

They are two of thousands of Yazidi women and girls who have been abused by the terror group, and they told EU politicians that more must be done to protect their people, a minority of 500,000 living primarily in northern Iraq.

The Yazidi follow an ancient religion that ISIS and other Muslim hard-liners consider heretical.

Nadia escaped after three months, while Lamiya tried to flee four times before finally escaping in March.

She was scarred by a landmine as fighters pursued her, and is now unable to see out of one eye.

Her two companions, eight-year-old Almas and 20-year-old Katherine, were killed in the blast. She never learned their last names.

Speaking to AP after her escape, Lamiya said: 'I managed in the end, thanks to God, I managed to get away from those infidels.

'Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it, because I have survived them.'

Last year Nadia told the United Nations Security Council that Yazidi women and children are traded as 'war booty'.

She was snatched and repeatedly raped by 'countless' men several times a day.

She said: 'Rape was used to destroy women and girls and to guarantee that these women could never lead a normal life again.

'Islamic State has made Yazidi women into flesh to be trafficked in.'

Accepting the prize, whose previous winners include Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi, Nadia said: 'They wanted to take our honor but they lost their honor.'

Both are now demanding that those responsible face an international court for war crimes.

The award, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was created in 1988 to honour individuals or groups who defend human rights and fundamental freedoms.

ENSLAVED, BEATEN AND RAPED BY ISIS:
LAMUYA AJI BASHAR'S HEARTBREAKING STORY

Lamiya was abducted from the village of Kocho, near the town of Sinjar, in the summer of 2014. Her parents are presumed dead. Somewhere, she said, her 9-year-old sister Mayada remains captive. One photo she managed to send to the family shows the little girl standing in front of an IS flag.

Five other sisters all managed to escape and later were relocated to Germany. A younger brother, kept for months in an IS training camp in Mosul, also slipped away and is now staying with other relatives in Dahuk, a city in the Iraqi Kurdish region.

Sitting very still and speaking in a monotone, Lamiya recounted her captivity, describing how she was passed from one IS follower to another, all of whom beat and violated her. She was determined to escape.



She said her first 'owner' was an Iraqi IS commander who went by the name Abu Mansour in the city of Raqqa, the de-facto IS capital deep in Syria. He brutalized her, often keeping her handcuffed.

She tried to run away twice but was caught, beaten and raped repeatedly. After a month, she said, she was sold to another IS extremist in Mosul. After she spent two months with him, she was sold again, this time to an IS bomb-maker who Lamiya said forced her to help him make suicide vests and car bombs.

'I tried to escape from him,' she said. 'And he captured me, too, and he beat me.'

When the bomb-maker grew bored with her, she was handed over to an IS doctor in Hawija, a small IS-controlled Iraqi town. She said the doctor, who was the IS head of the town hospital, also abused her.

From there, after more than a year, she managed to contact her relatives in secret.

Her uncle said the family paid local smugglers $800 to arrange Lamiya's escape. She will be reunited with her siblings in Germany, but despite everything, her heart remains in Iraq.

'We had a nice house with a big farm ... I was going to school,' she said. 'It was beautiful.'

PLEASE follow Link below to Full Heartbreaking Article - Videos - Photos:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... prize.html

[Anthea]

The entire world is playing war games in Syria and Iraq

BUT they do NOTHING

to rescue the Yazidi women still being used as sex slaves by ISIS

phpBB [video]

[Anthea]

‘I cannot sleep at night’: A Yazidi mother’s anguish over her husband and daughters, captured by ISIS

Squatting on a rug in the gloomy glow of a battery-powered light, Ayshan Murat’s face was a tortured mask of anguish and despair.

With her youngest son, Hachem, a toddler, fussing at her feet, and her older son, Jamal, who is not yet a teenager, sitting ramrod straight beside her, she explained in a whisper that she, her husband and five children were captured by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on Aug. 3, 2014 as the jihadists raced across western Iraq, murdering thousands of Yazidi men and forcing thousands of Yazidi women into sexual slavery.

Murat and her two boys were freed after 14 months in captivity when her father-in-law and other relatives paid ISIS a US$20,000 ransom.



But nothing has been heard of her husband or her three daughters since the day the family and their flock of 400 sheep were seized from their farming village at the western foot of Sinjar mountain.

Murat, Hachem and Jamal were separated from the rest of their kin and taken across the border into Syria with about 500 other Yazidi women and children to ISIS’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa. Murat’s husband and girls, aged nine, seven and five, were sent east to Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, which is now besieged on all sides by Iraqi and Kurdish forces and a mixture of religious militias.

“I have heard nothing of my husband and daughters since the day that Daesh took us,” Murat said, referring to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.

Aid workers familiar with such cases are certain that Murat’s husband is dead and that her daughters have endured the same extreme abuse that Murat must have been subjected to when she was held by ISIS.

“I cannot sleep at night, I think and I think and I think,” Murat said, before asking why the United Nations and the world had forsaken her family and Yazidis.

The Yazidis of northwestern Iraq have their own ghastly tale that is without parallel. As barbarically as ISIS has behaved toward Shias and Christians trapped in its path, it reserved a special hell for the Yazidis whom it condemned “as devil worshipers.”

The Yazidis, who do not follow a written book, believe in one God who created the world and placed it in the care of seven angels.

The Iraqi and Kurdish governments and international organizations think that within an hour’s drive of Sinjar Mountain there are at least 72 mass graves filled with the bodies of Yazidis who have been shot, or in some cases, buried alive. The leg bones and jaws of some of the victims were clearly visible in a field in the city of Sinjar, which lies just over the mountain from where Murat had sought refuge in an abandoned house with her brother-in-law, his wife and their children, in the town of Sinuni.

Driving down switchback turns into Sinjar, which was liberated from ISIS by Kurdish forces last month with the help of air strikes directed by American and Canadian special forces spotters, it was still possible to see a ghostly trail of clothing, including shoes that were left behind as Yazidis fled into the hills two years ago. That exodus triggered a humanitarian crisis atop Sinjar Mountain.

Once the economic and cultural heart of the Yazidi community and a home for nearly 100,000 of them, Sinjar is today an abandoned town of shattered, booby-trapped buildings and a warren of tunnels that ISIS used to avoid air strikes and escape.

ISIS did “terrible things,” said Aziz Chanem as he led a small group of visitors through the ruins of what had been his hometown. “You can understand the meaning of ‘destroyed’ if you come here. Yazidi women were taken. Yazidi men were killed.”

ISIS provided religious justification for its gross mistreatment of those it regards as non-believers, even outlining its disturbing rules “on taking captives and slaves” in a booklet. It was allowed to beat those women and girls who had been captured but not on the head, the instructions said. There was also a price list. Women between 35 and 40 years of age were to be sold for $75. Women and girls between 10 and 20 years of age were valued at $130. There was a premium on girls under the age of nine. They were listed as costing $172.

“I don’t think anybody could really understand the depth of human suffering that has happened here,” said Marigold Vercoe, an Australian psychiatric nurse who was been working with Yazidi women for more than a year. “The kind of trauma and kind of cruelty that these people have endured is something beyond what many of us have ever heard of or thought of. How they keep going through the injury and assault and abuse that they have suffered is amazing to me.”

“They cannot finalize within themselves whether they are dead or alive or in captivity,” she said. “They live in perpetual grief that can be very taxing.”

Aziz Khalaf, a veterinarian who oversees intelligence in Sinjar and Sinuni for the Kurdish government, said that since ISIS had been pushed back, about 50,000 of the 180,000 people who lived in the area had been able to return and 23 schools had been reopened. But many more lived in refugee camps. Hundreds of boreholes had to be repaired or drilled to provide water; there was still no electricity. Entire flocks of sheep and chickens stolen by ISIS had to replaced. There was almost no work to be had.

Despite this heavy mix of problems, those who work in this area continue are propelled by optimism. Marigold Vercoe said she had seen examples of resilience that make her guardedly optimistic that the spirit of the Yazidi women she works with had not been crushed.

“I am inspired by many of the women that have returned from intense suffering and intense abuse,” she said. “They decide for the sake of their children they are going to get better and they work at making themselves better. They work at providing as comfortable a home as they can in their tent or unfinished building. Many of these women are inspiring to know because of the courage they show. They try to leave behind what has happened behind them.

“We can help them with material things. But what they want is faith and hope.”

Ayshan Murat, the shattered wife and mother, told Vercoe that there was nothing she could do to win the release of her husband and daughters.

“They are in God’s hands,” she said, as she obsessively touched images of her daughters that she had on her cell phone. “We depend on God to take care of us. We believe in Him. I have no power, so I ask God to release them.”

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/i-can ... ed-by-isil

[Anthea]

Yazidi woman escapes Islamic State in Mosul as Iraqi forces advance

A Yazidi woman held captive by Islamic State militants for more than two years managed to escape when Iraqi forces pushed into Mosul and provided information that helped them retake a neighbourhood of the city, Iraqi commanders said.

The 42-year old woman, who asked to remain unnamed, was kidnapped by the militants from her hometown of Sinjar in the summer of 2014 when they overran northern Iraq and purged its Yazidi minority.

Hundreds of Yazidis were killed and more than 6,000 taken captive by the hardline Sunni Muslim militants, who regard the Yazidis' faith as devil-worship.

Since then, some have escaped or have been bought back from the militants, but as many as 3,500 remain in Islamic State captivity, according to a recent estimate provided by the office that handles kidnappings in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

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

The woman, speaking to reporters on Friday, said she had been moved from one neighbourhood of Mosul to another until her captor fled the city, leaving her with his parents in the Quds neighborhood, which she was finally able to flee.

"I escaped with some families at night, around 3 am," she said in a faint voice, her face completely covered by a black veil covering her face and her hands clasped on her lap.

It was not immediately clear when she escaped captivity but Iraqi forces entered the Quds district on Thursday.

Major General Maan Saadi of the elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), which is spearheading the campaign to retake Mosul, said the woman had provided information that helped the operation in the area.

"We took her in with open arms and were able to get some information from her about the neighbourhood, which proved useful during our attack and advance on the Quds neighbourhood," Saadi said.

Since the offensive began 10 weeks ago, U.S.-backed forces have retaken a quarter of Mosul in the biggest ground operation in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi forces launched a second phase of the offensive this week, pushing from three directions into eastern districts where the battle has been deadlocked for nearly a month.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-midea ... SKBN14K08C

I wonder how many more innocent Yazidi women are trapped in Mosul

[Anthea]

Trustee forces the Êzidîs/Yazidis in Amed to move to AFAD camps in Mardin

The Êzidî community who faced with continued policies of genocide and annihilation throughout their history experienced yet another attempt of genocide by the ISIS in August, 2014.

Among these hundreds of thousands of Êzidîs who managed to get to Turkey and North Kurdistan after a long journey full of pain and difficulties, some migrated to Europe and some others turned back to Shengal after its liberation from ISIS by HPG, YBŞ and YJŞ forces.

The Êzidîs sheltered in North Kurdistan territory include those who were settled in a camp in Fidanlık area of the Yenişehir district municipality. During the two years in this camp, they had just recently started to leave behind the savagery they suffered amid a continued rehabilitation process.

The Êzidî people staying in this camp have now become a target for the AKP government following the seizure of the DBP-held municipalities through the imprisonment of elected Kurdish representatives and their replacement with trustees.

Efforts are being made to send these Êzidîs to the AFAD camps in Midyat and Nusaybin districts of Mardin. The already aggrieved community describes this intended transfer as 'exile'.

The state-run camps of AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency) became a topic of conversation with cases of rape and sexual abuse since the first they they were set up, and these camps mainly serve as headquarters where ISIS members are provided with shelter and training. The Êzidî people therefore do not see these camps safe for themselves.

Following the recent seizure of Amed's Yenişehir Municipality by an appointed trustee, intense security measures were taken around the camp in Fidanlık area and the municipal employees working here are since denied permission to enter the camp which is surrounded with wire fence and gendarmes deployed around, which causes psychological pressure on the Êzidîs.

The trustee threatens the Êzidîs that refuse to go to the AFAD camps in Midyat and Nusaybin that their electricity and water will be cut off, and promises to send them to Europe later on in order to make sure that they leave the camp now.

Many Êzidîs remain determined to stay in the Fidanlık camp than to settle in the AFAD camps