Three Yazidi girls freed from Islamic State captivity in Iraq
Syrian Kurds repatriated 25 Iraqi Yazidi women and children after freeing them during the final push against ISIS, April 13, 2019. Photo: AFP
DUHOK, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— The director of the Yazidi Rescue Center in Duhok city in Iraqi Kurdistan, Hussein Qaidi, said on Wednesday that three Yazidi girls had been rescued from Islamic State group (ISIS) captivity.
Qaidi said the girls are between the ages of 15 to 19, adding they were kidnapped along with their families on August 15, 2014 in the village of Kocho in the Yazidi Sinjar district in northwest Iraq.
The rescued girls are being held in a safe place and will be returned to their families soon.
“Our office will intensify and continue our efforts to find the remaining missing Yazidis no matter the difficulties.” Qaidi said.
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 militia forces withdrew from the area without a fight leaving behind the Yazidi civilians to IS killing and genocide.
Thousands of Yazidi families fled to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.
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, according to official statistics.
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.
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