Syria Kurds return 25 Yazidis freed from Islamic State to Iraq
Syria Kurds return 25 Yazidis freed from Islamic State to Iraq, April 13, 2019. Photo: Screengrab/K24 TV
QAZLAJOKH, Syrian Kurdistan,— Syrian Kurds on Saturday repatriated 25 women and children from Iraq’s Yazidi minority after freeing them during the final push against the Islamic State group, a local official said.
The US-backed Kurdish fighters say they rescued some 300 Yazidi women and children during the fight to take the jihadists’ last scrap of territory in eastern Syria.
“Today, we will hand over 25 people — 10 women and 15 children — to the Yazidi council in Sinjar,” said Ziyad Rustam, an official with the Kurdish-run group Yazidi House, which reunites rescued Yazidi children with surviving relatives.
“They will be sent to their families,” he told AFP.
At the Yazidi House headquarters in a village near the northeastern Kurdish city of Qamishlo in Syrian Kurdistan, women wearing colourful robes collected children scampering around the compound before boarding busses bound for Sinjar, the Yazidi heartland in Iraq.
“The fate of my three sisters remains unknown… I don’t know anything about them,” said 17-year-old Jamila Haidar.
“I hope we will be reunited soon.”
Iraq’s Yazidis are a symbol of the suffering caused by the Islamic State (IS) group during its rein over vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.
The jihadists stormed through Iraq’s northwest in 2014 slaughtering thousands of men and boys and abducting women and girls to be abused as sex slaves.
But they have since lost all of the once-sprawling cross-border “caliphate” to multiple offensive.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month announced the defeat of the IS proto-state after tens of thousands of people streamed out of the jihadists’ last patch of territory, around the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.
Rustam said SDF had in total liberated 850 Yazidi women and children during its battles against IS since 2015.
But 3,040 Yazidis are still missing, he said, adding that the search for them was ongoing.
Rustam said the jihadists had “sold many of them to people inside Syria, in places like Idlib”, most of which is held by a former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Some of the Yazidis extracted from IS’s last sliver of territory are being held at the Kurdish-run Al-Hol camp, which also houses jihadist family members.
In August 2014, ISIS militants attacked the Sinjar district, which was home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, whose syncretic religion incorporates many aspects of local faiths. Because of their beliefs, Yazidis were specifically targeted by the hardline Islamist militants for a campaign of horrific violation.
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.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, AFP | Ekurd.net
Comments