Roundup: ISIS committing genocide against Yazidis: UN commission

A latest report by a UN commission warned that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is committing genocide against Yazidis, an ethnically Kurdish religious community or an ethno-religious group indigenous to northern Mesopotamia.

The report, "They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis", was issued Thursday by the independent international Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic in Geneva.

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing", emphasised Paulo Pinheiro, chairperson of the commission, adding that "ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities."

As per the Commission's mandate, the report focuses on violations committed against Yazidis inside Syria, where thousands of women and girls are still being held captive and abused, often as slaves.

"ISIS has sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm," the report warned.

It added that ISIS also has taken measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters so as to cut them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community.

"ISIS separated Yazidi men and boys over 12 from the rest of their families, and killed those who refused to convert, in order to destroy their identity as Yazidis," the report noted.

According to the report, women and children often witnessed these killings before being forcibly transferred to locations in Iraq, and thereafter to Syria, where the majority of captives remain.

Thousands of women and girls, some as young as nine, have been sold in slave markets in the Syrian governorates of Raqqah, Aleppo, Homs, Hasakah and Dayr Az-Zawr, the report said, adding that ISIS and its fighters usually hold them both in sexual slavery and in slavery, with Yazidi women and girls being constantly sold or gifted between fighters.

One woman, who estimated she had been sold 15 times, was cited by the Commission that "It is hard to remember all those who bought me".

The report noted that ISIS, which considers the Yazidis to be infidels, has publicly cited the Yazidis' faith as the basis for an attack in August of 2014 and its subsequent abuse of them.

Saying that its findings are based on interviews with survivors, religious leaders, smugglers, activists, lawyers, medical personnel, and journalists, as well as extensive documentary material, the UN Commission urged that more must be done to assure the protection of this religious minority in the Middle East, and the funding of care, including psycho-social and financial support, for victims of this genocide. Endit