The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a press report on Thursday saying militants of the extremist Islamic State group committed genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq.
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Iraq’s Yazidis are concentrated in Nineveh province and the Kurdish region. In August, the group attacked Yazidi villages near the town of Sinjar and eventually encircled and trapped tens of thousands of Yazidis atop Mount Sinjar.
IS, which has seized about a third of the territory in Iraq and Syria, considers the Yazidis to be devil-worshippers.
“We’ve seen that the region has been essentially entirely cleansed of its religious and ethnic minorities in the span of 3 months” said Cameron Hudson, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. “We have a moral responsibility not just to bear witness to these crimes but to act to prevent them”.
Displaced Iraqis who fled the Islamic State during that period shared in dozens of personal interviews harrowing accounts of displacement, forced conversion, rape, torture, kidnapping and murder. It added: “We sat with Yazidi men as they wrote name after name of their missing family members-wives and daughters, who they believed were kidnapped, and sons and brothers, whose circumstances they did not know”.
I.S. boasted previous year that it had reinstated slavery, offering its fighters captured Yazidi women and girls as loot. “This was especially true for the poor and those without access to cars or trucks, who had to flee on foot”, the report said. “Their release must be a priority”, it said.
“I am appalled to hear that in 2014 genocide was perpetrated against the Yezidi people in Iraq and that Christians and other minority communities were the victims of ethnic and religious cleansing”, Meissner said, “Over seventy years ago the world vowed never again, yet today the world is again faced with a group, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, that is intent on destroying people based on their religion or their ethnicity”. The report was welcomed by Yazidi human rights activist Dakhil Shammo, who hailed two pieces of good news-“the report and the liberation operation”.
“The Islamic State’s Targeting of Iraqi Minorities in Ninewa”, also finds that the terror group “perpetrated crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes against Christian, Yezidi, Turkmen, Shabak, Sabaean-Mandaen, and Kaka’I in Ninewa province from June-August 2014”.
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The United Nations said in March that the Islamic State group may have committed genocide in trying to wipe out the Yazidi minority and urged the U.N. Security Council to refer the issue to the global Criminal Court for prosecution.
