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World must recognize Daesh crimes as genocide: Izadi activists

A migrant child stands next to a placard reading "Please save Yazidi people from genocide" as Pope Francis greets migrants and refugees at the Moria refugee camp on April 16, 2016 near the port of Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos. ©AFP

Campaigners of Iraq’s Izadi minority have urged the international community to recognize crimes committed by Daesh against the Kurdish-speaking community as a case of genocide.

The Izadi campaigners are demanding international justice for the Daesh crimes in an attempt to prevent atrocities against them and punish those victimizing women and children.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation interviewed two Izadi girls who recently escaped from Daesh captivity in Iraq’s northwestern town of Sinjar in summer 2014.

“Thousands of our girls and women have committed suicide. Ten-year-old girls are being sold four times a day…We the Yazidi are powerless and no one to back us,” said Hanifa, who did not want to give her full name for fear of reprisals.

“We want international protection and our genocide to be recognized  ... as without international protection and apply the rule of genocide, this will happen all over again,” she added.

A photo taken on January 15, 2015 shows displaced Iraqi women from the Izadi community, who fled clashes between the Daesh Takfiri group and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, gathering around their tents at a refugee camp set up on Mount Sinjar.©AFP

Nasreen, another interviewee who managed to escape the Takfiri group, said, “I keep thinking about the girls who are still in their grip. Although I have been freed, I always think of them. Life was like being in hell in their hands.”

She further slammed the international community for remaining silent on the terrorist group’s heinous crimes and said, “The world is not listening to us and not doing anything for us.”

“I ask European countries to do something for us, and recognize our genocide,” Nasreen said.

In a similar move back in 2015, Free Yezidi Foundation and Yazda submitted to International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda a report detailing acts of savagery perpetrated by Daesh in northern Iraq in 2014.

The document entailed the killing of the sick and the elderly, the summary executions of over 700 Izadi men, the rape of thousands of women and the abduction of children.

The Daesh terrorists have killed, raped and enslaved thousands of Izadis since the eruption of their insurgency in Iraq in 2014, forcing over 400,000 of the religious minority group to flee their homes in the Arab country.

Daesh Takfiris have committed gruesome crimes and terrorized members of various communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians during their onslaught in Iraq and Syria. 


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