(Newswire.net — March 21, 2015) Bagdad, Iraq — The Islamic State’s (ISIS) murderous campaign against Iraq’s Yezidi Kurds “may amount to genocide,” leaving the perpetrators open to trial by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the United Nations said in a report Thursday.
ISIS stormed the town of Shingal in northern Iraq last August, unleashing a spree of killings, rape and kidnappings against the town’s predominantly Yezidi population.
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, said that the pattern of attacks against the Yezidis “pointed to the intent of ISIL to destroy the Yezidi as a group.” It added, this “strongly suggests” that ISIL may have perpetrated genocide.”
The report cites the brutal and targeted killings of hundreds of Yezidi men and boys in the Nineveh plains: “In numerous Yezidi villages, the population was rounded up. Men and boys over the age of 14 were separated from women and girls. The men were then led away and shot by ISIL, while the women were abducted as the ‘spoils of war.’”
It said that, in some instances “villages were entirely emptied of their Yezidi population.”
“Witnesses heard girls – as young as six and nine years old – screaming for help as they were raped in a house used by ISIL fighters. One witness described how two ISIL members sat laughing as two teenage girls were raped in the next room. A pregnant woman, repeatedly raped by an ISIL ‘doctor’ over a period of two and a half months, said he deliberately sat on her stomach. He told her, ‘this baby should die because it is an infidel; I can make a Muslim baby,’” according to the stark report.
“Boys between the ages of eight and 15 told the mission how they were separated from their mothers and taken to locations in Iraq and Syria,” the report added.
“They were forced to convert to Islam and subjected to religious and military training, including how to shoot guns and fire rockets. They were forced to watch videos of beheadings. One child was told, ‘This is your initiation into jihad… you are an Islamic State boy now.’”
ISIS has singled out Yezidis, Christians and other non-Muslim minorities for especially brutal treatment. Its fighters consider the Yezidis as pagans and infidels.
The UN report said ISIS “may have committed all three of the most serious international crimes – namely war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide,”
On the 20th of March, 2015 Seven Yezidi Kurd families escaped from the Islamic State and had taken refuge on Mount Shingal, a Kurdish official has told Rudaw.
“Members of the families are in a good condition but a bit exhausted, since they have been on foot for a long time,” said Hasan Koro, an officer of Kurdistan Regional Government’s Office of Kidnapped Affairs, on Friday.
Koro added that there were many children among the 34 Yazidi Kurds who arrived at Peshmerga positions on Mount Shingal, some 137 km northwest of the ISIS-held city of Mosul.
When the Shingal district was captured by ISIS in August, some 4,500 Yazidi Kurds were captured by ISIS. Nine hundred of the Yezidis managed to escape with the remainder still missing.