Yazidi Kurds see fleeing Middle East as only option for survival

[Sally]

I don't blame them for fleeing as they are being picked off, but it is a shame to see such an ancient civilization leave the area.\


Yazidi Kurds see fleeing Middle East as only option for survival
Posted on May 2, 2016 by Editorial Staff in Yazidis

An Iraqi Yazidi Kurd. Photo: DW

SHARYA, Kurdistan region ‘Iraq’,— Stuck in refugee camps after fleeing IS, Yazidi Kurds have few options, especially since the Middle East’s most vulnerable people have been excluded from international migration talks. Diego Cupolo reports from Sharya, Iraq.

Humanitarian workers say the EU-Turkey migrant deal is leaving out the Middle East’s most vulnerable people: Yazidis in Iraq. The agreement is meant to reduce the flow of asylum-seekers to Greece by exchanging those dubbed “economic migrants” in Europe for Syrian refugees in Turkish camps.

“I think the deal is a huge mistake and needs to be rewritten to include Yazidis and other religious minorities stuck here in Iraq,” said Dr. Mirza Dinnayi, director of Air Bridge Iraq, a charity facilitating temporary asylum for trauma victims. “Europe and Turkey are forgetting about the most persecuted people of recent history.”

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Yazidi Kurds see fleeing Middle East as only option for survival?

 

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Pitiful...

Yazidi Woman, Disfigured by Mine After Escaping IS, Awaits Aid
May 06, 2016 — When Lamiya Hachi Bashar escaped the house of an Islamic State fighter in Iraq in mid-April, she thought months of enslavement and IS terror were finally over.

But on her way to freedom outside the Iraqi town of Hawija, Bashar, 18, lost her sight in a blast from a land mine explosion. Her face was severely disfigured. “Her right eye is pretty much gone, but her left eye can recover,” said Kurdish doctor Husain Bahrari, who treated her. “She also suffers from extensive facial laceration.” Bashar, one of thousands of Yazidis who have suffered under systematic violence by IS, is facing a bleak future. Her doctor told VOA that her complex injuries require treatment that is not available in Iraq. “There needs to be a plastic surgery quickly to avoid scars that are unrecoverable,” Bahrari said. “A young girl her age needs that.” But Bashar is waiting to get an entry visa to Germany and is facing uncertainty about who is going to pay for medical procedures, a German charity attempting to help her said.

Lamiya Hachi Bashar before she was taken into slavery by Islamic State in 2014.​

She's 'traumatized'

“We are trying to get her to Germany, but the visa process is slow and we’re limited on resources,” said Mirza Dinnayi, head of the German-based Air Bridge Iraq. “The poor girl is traumatized and needs to resettle somewhere else. But this is not possible now.” When IS attacked Bashar’s village of Kojo in August 2014, she and 12 members of her family were taken prisoner. Around 5,000 Yazidi men and women were captured by the militants that summer. Some 2,000 of them managed to escape or were smuggled out of IS’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria, activists say. “I was kept in a prison with my family for one month before they took me and my two sisters along with hundreds of the girls to [IS capital] Raqqa,” Bashar told VOA. VOA could not independently verify Bashar’s story. While in IS captivity, Bashar said she was sold five times as a sex slave and faced mental and physical abuse. One IS leader in Mosul forced her into making suicide belts and preparing car bombs.

Marriage refused

“IS fighters were coming many times to take them,” she said. “He [one IS militant] asked me to marry him. ... I told him, ‘I won’t do this and I won’t help you.’ He hit me with hoses and floor squeegee handles. There was nothing left he didn’t use to beat me.” Bashar was later sold to an IS doctor in the Iraqi town of Hawija, where she met two other Yazidi girls, Almas, 8, and Katherine, 20. They were able to secretly contact their relatives, who arranged with a middleman to facilitate their escape. In mid-April, the girls started their dangerous journey to escape IS slavery to Iraqi Kurdistan. An Arab family also accompanied the girls, Bashar said.

Lamiya Hachi Bashar is now waiting at the home of relatives after receiving limited medical treatments for her blast injuries​

Their facilitator took the group out of the city in a car, Bashar said. Their guide told them to avoid land mines that IS placed to stop people from fleeing. “Katherine stepped on a mine, and all I saw after that was a bright light in front of my eyes,” Bashar said. “I called Katherine and Almas but all I heard was an ‘ah’ from Katherine.” The girls died at the scene, their bodies left in a field. Bashar, who was injured, does not remember how she was rescued. Family members say her guide took her to the Kurdish Peshmerga.

Waiting with relatives

 

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'Sexual Jihad"...

Yazidi Victim of ISIS: ‘I Was Gang-Raped, They Call This Practice Sexual Jihad’
September 6, 2016 | Another young victim of the Islamic State’s genocidal practices, Nadia Murad, said the radical Islamic group killed her mother and six of her brothers and sold her into sex-slavery, where she was regularly raped and even gang-raped, what her captors called “sexual jihad.”

Murad further said that the Islamic State (or Daesh) “came with the sole aim of destroying the Yazidi identity through force, rape, recruitment of children and destruction of all our temples.” This is “genocide against our identity,” she said, adding that “rape was used to destroy women and girls and to ensure that they could never lead a normal life.” Murad was 21 when the Islamic State invaded her village in Sinjar, Iraq in August 2014. At least 312 Yazidi men, including Murad’s brothers, reportedly were rounded up by Daesh and killed. Murad was taken to Mosul, Iraq with 150 other Yazidi women and children. There, Murad was given to an Islamic State jihadist as a “gift.” Murad described her experience and how she escaped from Daesh, in late 2014, in a February 2016 interview with the BBC’s HARDtalk program. Host Sarah Montague asked the young woman, “How did you manage to escape?”

Nadia Murad said, “The first time I tried to escape I was with the first man [from Mosul] who raped me and treated me badly. I thought to myself, I must run away although I didn’t believe I would succeed. Daesh militants were everywhere in Mosul.” “I tried to escape through a window but I was immediately caught by one of the guards who put me in a room,” she said. “Under their rules, a captured woman becomes a spoil of war if she is caught trying to escape. She is put in a cell and raped by all the men in that compound.” “I was gang-raped,” said Murad. “They call this practice sexual jihad. Afterwards, I couldn’t even think of trying to escape again. “The final man that I stayed with in Mosul lived alone,” she said. “When he decided to sell me on he went to get me some clothes. He told me to wash myself and get ready to be sold to someone else.” “Even though I thought it was impossible, I managed to leave the compound,” said Murad. “I called at a house, a Muslim family with no connection to Daesh lived there. I asked them for help. I said to them that my brother would give them whatever they wanted in return.”

She continued, “The family told me that they did not support Daesh and had no connection with them. They gave me all the help they could. They gave me a black abaya and an Islamic ID, and then they took me to the border.” “And that allowed you to escape and get out?” said the BBC’s Sarah Montague. “Yes, the family helped me to escape,” said Murad.

In testimony before the United Nations Security Council in December 2015, Nadia Murad said she was able to escape “three months after my abduction” and that she currently lives in Germany, where she was given medical care and assistance. “But this is not just about my suffering; it is about collective suffering,” said Murad. “Daesh gave us two options: become a Muslim or die. And even men who agreed to become Muslims out of fear for their lives were killed, their women enslaved and their children recruited.” “Sixteen mass graves have been discovered so far,” she said. “One of them contains the remains of 80 women — including my mother — whom they did not desire and so decided to kill. More than 400,000 thousand people have been displaced, and over 40 per cent of our land is still under the control of Daesh.”

Murad has testified about her experience before many governments, including the U.S. Congress. She is a human rights activist now, fighting to stop the Islamic State genocide against the Yazidis, Christians, and other religious minorities. She also has been nominated for the 2016 Nobel Prize.

Yazidi Victim of ISIS: ‘I Was Gang-Raped, They Call This Practice Sexual Jihad’

 

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UN report on ISIS genocide at Sinjar...

ISIS Genocide of Yazidi Boys, Men: Shot or Beheaded, ‘Family Members Often Forced to Witness the Killings’
October 4, 2016 – In its report on the genocide of the Yazidi people in Sinjar, Iraq, at the hands of the Islamic State, the United Nations documented that thousands of men and boys (12 or older) were slaughtered in the streets – shot in the head or throats cut (beheaded) – and that “family members were often forced to witness the killings.”

As one witness, a 16-year-old girl who was held captive for seven months and sold as a sex slave, told the U.N., “After we were captured, ISIS forced us to watch them beheading some of our Yazidi men. They made the men kneel in a line in the street, with their hands tied behind their backs. The ISIS fighters took knives and cut their throats.” The U.N. Human Rights Council report, They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis, is based upon 45 interviews of survivors, smugglers, activists, doctors, nurses, and journalists, which corroborated information and material collected by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. The Islamic State forces attacked the Yazidi villages in Sinjar in northern Iraq on Aug. 3, 2014. It is estimated that at least 5,000 Yazidis have been killed, so far, by ISIS as a direct act of genocide.

ISIS executioners murder men in the street.​

The U.N. states that “over 3,200 Yazidi women and children are still held by ISIS. Most are in Syria where Yazidi females continue to be sexually enslaved and Yazidi boys are indoctrinated, trained and used in hostilities. Thousands of Yazidi men and boys are missing. The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing.” Specifically in reference to the Yazidi men and boys, the U.N. reported that upon capture on Aug. 3, 2014, and in the days that followed, ISIS swiftly separated the men with the boys who had reached puberty. Younger boys were allowed to stay with their mothers and sisters.

Following these separations, “ISIS fighters summarily executed men and older boys who refused to convert to Islam,” said the U.N. The report further states:

* Most of those [men and boys] killed were executed by gunshots to the head; others had their throats cut [heads cut off with a knife].
* ISIS fighters carried out executions of male Yazidis in the streets and towns and villages, at makeshift checkpoints, on roadsides as well as on the lower sections of the roads ascending Mount Sinjar.
* Other captives, including family members, were often forced to witness the killings.
* The Yazidi men were not heard from again.
* The bodies of those killed on capture were often left in situ.

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