U.S. President Donald Trump listens to the Iraqi Yazidi activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, as he meets with survivors of religious persecution in the Oval Office of the White House July 17, 2019. Photo: AP
WASHINGTON,— US President Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared unfamiliar with the work and cause of Nobel laureate Nadia Murad as she pleaded with him to help the Yazidis of Iraq.
Trump, who has made religious freedom a centerpiece of his foreign policy, met on Wednesday with victims of religious persecution from countries including China, Turkey, North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Myanmar.
Murad, one of thousands of women and girls from the ancient faith abducted by the Islamic State group as they overran swathes of Iraq in 2014, joined a group of survivors of religious persecution who met Trump in the Oval Office on the sidelines of a major meeting at the State Department.
After Murad explained how her mother and six brothers were killed and that 3,000 Yazidis remained missing, Trump said, “And you had the Nobel Prize? That’s incredible. They gave it to you for what reason?”
With little pause, Murad, who was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, repeated her story.
“After all this happened to me, I didn’t give up. I make it clear to everyone that ISIS raped thousands of Yazidi women,” she said, referring to the Islamic State group.
“Please do something. It’s not about one family,” she said.
Trump, who has boasted of crushing the self-styled caliphate of the Islamic State group that once stretched across Iraq and Syria, also appeared at a loss when Murad asked him to press the Iraqi and Kurdish governments to create safe conditions for the Yazidis to return.
“But ISIS is gone and now it’s Kurdish and who?” Trump asked, before later telling her, “I know the area very well.”
Murad also explained how Yazidis took dangerous routes to find safety in Germany, whose welcome to refugees has been vocally criticized by Trump.
In August 2014, the Islamic State ISIS militants attacked the Sinjar district, which was home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, after Massoud Barzani’s KDP peshmerga forces withdrew from the area without a fight leaving behind the Yazidi civilians to IS killing and genocide.
An unpublished report by Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government KRG reportedly reveals that an 18,000 peshmerga forces of KRG were on the spot and retreat without mounting any defense when Islamic state IS attacked the Yazidi area of Sinjar.
Thousands of Yazidi women were raped and murdered, with many of the survivors sold into sexual slavery and taken away to other parts of Iraq, Syria, and even further afield. Men and boys were systematically murdered, forced to work for the group, or coerced into becoming child soldiers.
It is estimated that 3,000 Yazidis were killed over a period of several days and 6,800 others were abducted.
Although several thousand Yazidis have been rescued over the last four-and-a-half years, another 3,000 remain missing.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish speaking religious group linked to Zoroastrianism and Sufism. The religious has roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by the hard-line Islamic State group.
Some 600,000 Yazidis live in villages in Iraqi Kurdistan region and in Kurdish areas outside Kurdistan region in around Mosul in Nineveh province, with additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Since the 1990s, the Yazidis have emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany. There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide.
The US leader also appeared unfamiliar when he met a representative from the Rohingya, a Muslim minority targeted in a brutal campaign two years ago in Myanmar.
One day earlier, his administration banned travel to the United States by Myanmar’s army chief and three other senior officers, calling the violence “ethnic cleansing.”
The Trump administration frequently speaks of promoting religious freedom, a key issue for much of his evangelical Christian base.
Government ministers and representatives of persecuted groups are spending three days at the State Department for a meeting on religious freedom, which Vice President Mike Pence will address on Thursday.
Among the other victims who met Trump were Christians from Myanmar, Vietnam, North Korea, Iran, Turkey, Cuba, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Sudan; Muslims from Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan and New Zealand; Jews from Yemen and Germany; a practitioner of Cao Dai from Vietnam; and a Yazidi from Iraq.
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