This content was published in
02 August 2024 – 22:00
Geneva, Aug 2 (EFE).- The Sinjar massacre, in which thousands of Yazidi men were killed during the Islamic State (IS) takeover of the city in northwestern Iraq, will mark its tenth anniversary this Saturday, and UN experts have taken advantage of the opportunity to demand justice for the victims.
“This tragedy reminds us that suspected IS members still detained in northeastern Syria must be repatriated and tried for these crimes, including gender-based crimes, in national courts,” said Paulo Pinheiro, chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, in a statement.
IS committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in its assault on the town of Sinjar near the Syrian border on 3 August 2014, including mass executions, forced conversions to Islam, slavery and sexual violence against women and girls, the commission has said in previous reports.
At the time of the attack, some 400,000 Yazidis were taking refuge in the area, a community that the commission recalled on Friday was “destroyed.”
Following the attack, the Islamic State forcibly displaced thousands of Yazidis (a religion that predates Islam and is practiced mainly by ethnic Kurds in the Middle East), often to Syrian territory, forcing, for example, children as young as seven to participate in suicide and military actions.
“Yazidi women and girls were enslaved, tortured, treated inhumanely, killed and raped as part of this genocidal campaign,” the three-member commission of experts said.
Many of these victims remain detained, along with the IS militants who abused them, in camps in northeastern Syria, now on suspicion of close ties to IS, and the commission members stressed that they should be released and offered the chance to return to Iraq if they wish.
The Yazidis still detained are among the 44,000 women (many of them forcibly married to IS members) and children still held in captivity in camps such as Al Hol and Roj in northeastern Syria, two-thirds of whom are foreigners, not only from Iraq but from 60 other nations, the commission noted.
“Yazidi women and children, victims of genocide and other crimes committed by IS, remain detained alongside their captors in inhumane conditions in camps in northeastern Syria. The international community must support their rehabilitation and the pursuit of justice for them, rather than perpetuate the atrocities they suffered,” the experts concluded. EFE
abc/pddp
